When my wife was twelve years old, her mother, who was Puerto Rican, moved the family from New York City back to the island. My wife soon realized that many people on the island resented "New York" Puerto Ricans. Sadly, one of my wife's teachers was one of those myopic people.

A few years ago, my wife wrote a moving essay about her painful experiences with this teacher. The essay detailed the anger this teacher felt towards Puerto Rican students from the mainland. Although these children spoke and understood Spanish, they understandably had difficulty writing it. When the teacher corrected my wife's written work in Spanish, she would mark the paper so hard that it ripped each time she made corrections; the essays seemed to bleed from the profusion of red marks. My wife quickly learned that the only way to pass Spanish class was to have her neighbors correct her assignments before she turned them in.

Today, my wife is an accomplished teacher. She credits her mother with her success, because her mother recognized the value of an education despite the fact that she only had a sixth grade education. The infamous teacher with the red pen also had an impact, however; as a nascent teacher, my wife decided she would never make a student feel the shame and humiliation she felt when she received those torn essays. Although this incident happened twenty-seven years ago, the anger emanating from those essays is palpable to this very day.