I didn’t always teach adults who dropped out of high school. There was a time when I taught K-12 and specialized in secondary school Art. I taught watercolor painting and beginning art history and aesthetics. But I was also required to teach subjects I had no training in, like science and physical education. I still have materials from when I taught Middle School, extra-curricular worksheets in basic art techniques like shading and perspective. Now, sometimes when my adult students are studying geometry on our classroom computers, I hand out a worksheet on shading the basic geometric shapes. One worksheet shows a cartoonish mad scientist in his laboratory. It instructs the students to pick one light source in the picture and, using a pencil, shade the lab. I passed out a few of these sheets at the rehab. “Why are you asking us to shade a meth lab?” my students asked. “It’s not a meth lab,” I said, “the scientist could be inventing a cure for cancer.” I quickly took back all the sheets. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble here.” Including myself.

