Think organic coffee

I'm mugging for the camera, grasping for a shot of caffeine or inspiration. It's been one of those days. Not a single student showed up in my adult ed classroom. Oops. No, I have to take that back. With thirty minutes to go before my departure, one man who isn't even my student stopped by. He asked if he could send me a document to print for him. Why not? At least it's a student interaction to this long-ahs-ed day. Oh, Grammarly, leave me alone.

Waking up at 3:00 a.m. doesn't help. Not when I went to sleep at 11:00 p.m. Fourteen hours earlier, I predicted a rough sleep. "I'm going to regret this tonight," I announced to no one in particular as I drank my second cup of coffee yesterday afternoon. Naturally, I forgot about it. My body did not. Not wanting to make a bad situation worse, I vowed not to drink more coffee today. That didn't help, either. I drowsed my way through the morning, desperately propping open my eyelids. My saving mercy was a colleague needing assistance with one of our four less-than-intuitive database programs that I've been using for more than a decade, but he has just begun to negotiate. Poor fellow.

By midday, I fled to my car for respite. When my unpaid leave was finished half an hour later, I trudged through the brilliant sunshine and warming temperatures to the stagnant air within the prison that is my workplace. You think I'm being funny when I call it that. I'm being literal and metaphorical. It's one of the puns I am allowed to live every day. "Yes, dear," I say to my wife. "I'll be home at 5:30 if they release me."

My afternoon should have been occupied by the students who attend only on Fridays. Alas, it was not. Instead, I buckled down to data entry, comparing multiple lists of students to records of housing and participation, completing electronic registrations and attendance records, and otherwise making my eyes bug out of my head. When I'd had enough, I sat in my chair and glanced at the aftermath on my desk. "How to fill my final hour?" I pondered.

And there it was. I spied with my little eyes an orange box. The lettering commanded me to "Think organic coffee." Moments later, I received a notification that one of my pre-college writing students had submitted his third essay for grading. I read it, and I immediately realized that all the time and effort I'd put into giving him recommendations and suggestions for his previous attempts had been ignored, except for one: His essays needed to be longer.

This was the longest, by far. Sadly, he did not write it. AI did. Well, he may have written the original piece, but AI certainly refined it. No human I've met in 33 years of educating has ever written as poorly as Artificial Intelligence does. Thus, instead of spending time assisting his understanding of the flaws in his essay, I checked boxes and gave him a score. It was the bare minimum passing score, which was an improvement, but that was it. He wants to get into college without doing the hard work of preparing for it.

A little part of me said, "Why bother? He's just going to be another has-been. Why care?"

As soon as I thought that, however, the voice of a student from about eight years ago entered my brain. His name was Brian. I helped him earn his high school equivalent diploma when he was in his mid-thirties. Before he was released, he gave me a letter, and his final words became a quote I include in all my work emails: “Just because these men are locked up doesn’t mean they’re worthless. They’re still human. They still need. Don't give up on them. They need you, Mack."

It's late on a Friday afternoon. My neck and back hurt. A migraine is threatening to move in, and I should have left ten minutes ago. Seeing the box with the slogan "Think organic coffee" slowed me down when I was tempted to give up on a student who isn't paying attention. I made the pun in my mind about has-beans, and realized that Brian is right. I can't give up on these men, because if I do, who else is going to help them succeed? Who else is going to help them establish a new family tree, turning them from has-beens to someone who has beans?