I’ve taught at a more diverse range of institutions than anyone I know: an urban community college where high-school dropouts could receive their GEDs and Associate Degrees simultaneously; an Orthodox Jewish university where students studied Torah and Talmud in the mornings and secular subjects in the afternoons; a small, rural liberal arts school; prisons; a large state school with a student population equal to that of my hometown; and now my alma mater in my hometown. Happy accidents and happenstance have allowed me to teach the poorest students and the richest, the most conservative and the most liberal, students who struggled to write Standard English and ones who could have gone to the Ivies, self-declared Jews and Christians and Muslims and Hindus and atheists and secular humanists, in a classroom on the bottom floor of a housing project in Washington Heights, NYC, and on a campus with a student-run farm in Appalachia, students who were studying to be paralegals and security guards and doctors and lawyers and poets and farmers and activists and teachers, adults returning to education after decades away, veterans, and sixteen-year-olds getting college credit while incarcerated. I’ve taught in the opposite corner of the country from where I was raised—I’ve been the only white person in the room, the only woman, the only person who wasn’t Jewish, the only person allowed to leave the prison—and now I’m back, teaching students who are most like me, before I left.