Catch and Release
Early on a Thursday morning in the fall of 2011, I walked into my first class at Loyola University in New Orleans. It was a small windowless room in a building that looked idyllic on the outside but was tired, old, and stuffy on the inside. Fifteen or so students sat around the table in the room’s center, and we waited for the arrival of our professor.
It was a strange feeling, being back in the classroom. I hadn’t been in school since the spring of 2009, when the school I had been attending, the College of Santa Fe, went bankrupt amid the Great Recession. I packed my bags and went home to California, the first person in my family to attend (and subsequently outlive) a university. The ensuing two years were filled with part-time jobs back home and a leap of faith application to an AmeriCorps program that sent me to teach middle school in New Orleans. I fell in love with the city, and when my term was up I decided that I was going to stay there as long as I could, so I applied to Loyola and).
