A Rare ‘Thank You’ from a Former Student

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

I don’t often get messages from students like this because most of my former students are hard-core lefties, not American patriots who love their country.

“Did you see Tucker Carlson say ‘The DC swamp corruption fighting Trump is the same as the corruption of Ceausescu?’  If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have gotten the reference. I'm grateful I had you as a teacher. I didn't realize as a high school student why you worked yourself so hard to push us to learn to our fullest. I'm grateful for it now. Most teachers didn't work that hard.”

It is a rare moment that a former student thanks me for my teaching years when I really did care about their education and tried my hardest to deliver stellar teaching which was never recognized by my peers and administrators.  As a life-long Adjunct Professor, we always had to fight for our contracts each year because conservatives never got tenure or special privileges like the rest of the leftist brigade of teachers.

Many of my former students, too wrapped up in the leftist ideology indoctrinated into their brains full of mush since kindergarten, wore t-shirts with shocking messages or supporting appalling leftist causes. They did not understand reality and some even wore Marxist-worshipping and Che Guevara t-shirts to class because he was such a “cool” revolutionary.  

They continued to wear them to class even though I told them who he really was, how many innocents he had butchered in Castro’s regime and in South America.  I gave them lectures on Marx and what his professorial ideology did to millions around the world who became oppressed under communism and how 100 million innocents died under such ideology simply because they held divergent opinions from the ruling communist party line and dared to express them publicly or to their snitching families. My own father was killed by commies in 1989. The messages flew over their heads filled with brains that had been too brainwashed to leave room for truth and reality.

One of the Che Guevara t-shirt wearers found me on Facebook a few years back and apologized for having worn the offensive t-shirt to class even after I had told him that my Dad died at the hands of communist goons and how that piece of cloth he displayed in front of me three times a week angered and saddened me so.

One particular student I remember to this day, worshipped Hitler openly and in occasional class projects about historical figures students admired. Despite the fact that the history teacher Judy placed gruesome posters of Hitler’s Holocaust victims when they studied modern European history, I could not fathom such a fixation. He must have been just as evil in his dark heart as Hitler was. It did not surprise me when I found out that he is now a staunch Democrat and a lawyer in a small southern town.