The one thing that sticks out in my memory about my old high school teacher Ms. Diran was how incredibly hardworking she was, and how she expected everyone around her to be just as driven. I also remember she was the only black woman teacher in the school, which is especially shocking when you consider the fact that my old high school prided themselves on their “diverse” student body, but what about diversity in front of the class room? A couple of months ago, the name Ms. Diran used to strike panic in my heart, she was definitely one of the most feared teachers in the school, whether it was the 90 minute long rants she would go off on if a student answered a question wrong, or the all out manhunts she used to force the security guards to go on if you dared to skip her class, she managed to earn the respect of every student in that school. It wasn’t until after I graduated and went to Temple that I realized her true motives. 

I was in my Kids in Crises class, a GenED course that tackles the problems with diversity in the Philadelphia school system, when we started talking about the importance of having a diverse staff. It was just one statistic that the teacher read out loud that made me change my perspective, “black teachers are more likely to see potential in their black students then white teachers.” Instantly, memories of everything Ms. Diran had done to support black students in my school came back to me. How Ms. Diran was already running three different clubs but still decided to take on BSU half way through the school year because she didn’t want a white teacher running the club, or how whenever I went to her room during lunch there where always students in there, even students who didn’t take her class, and no matter how many times she threatened to kick everyone out for distracting her, she never did.

One of my most prominent memory of Ms. Diran was something that my friend, who was a TA for her told me. Apparently it was during lunch, when Ms. Diran’s back room started smelling heavily of weed. Ms. Diran immediately connected the dots, remembering that her vents linked up to the vents in the boys bathroom (yes that also presented other problems when it came to smells in her backroom), and ran out of the room. She came back less then a minute later dragging a tenth grader by the arm behind her. Ms. Diran yelled at everyone to get out of her room while shoving this kid into a chair. When my friend went back to the room after school, she learned that all Ms. Diran did was yell at him, she never called the principal, she never told the security guards, but she did force him to take her AP Biology class the next year. I think part of her knew that it wasn’t the right thing to report him, especially with our schools incredibly bias discipline system that often targeted black students, and she wasn’t going to let a small mistake ruin the potential she saw in him. After getting to know and understand Ms. Diran, I think thats one of the main things that set her apart from any other teacher I had, she didn’t care who you were because she didn’t have any prejudices, she saw potential in everyone, and she was going to force you to show her that potential.