“Right now, the country is a scary place for my students. Right now I’ve got students (…) that I know are scared. They don't know if they're going to get picked up by ICE. They don't know if their parents are going to get picked up by ICE (….) There's bigger work to do. And I think for me, that's what keeps me going. Even with everything that's happening right now, you get these moments (…) And you have a student that's conferencing with you, saying, ‘Thank you, Ms. Villa. You just helped me realize that I can be a good writer.’”
“We’ve got some great kids in this building and as as difficult as the world is and the district—the grades, the state exams don't look great all the time, the region's exams don't look great all the time—it’s the kids, the kids, the kids, right?”
“I love the kids. I've come to realize and accept that (…) I think at the end of the day, I love helping my people (…) I don't know if I would have the same motivation in another context. I never had another context. But there's a special love that I have for this population, for this neighborhood, because this is how I grew up. It's not my neighborhood, but it was very similar, and I know what it's like when a student walks into my room and they look disheveled in the morning. I understand. I understand that you probably had to get up, take your brother to school, and you are scared as hell riding on these trains, because the trains are just as scary as they were in the eighties and nineties.”
“So the grace and love that I show my kids and the grace and love that they show me back, I think it just keeps me going.”
“I've had a long history in this building, a lot of times where I wanted to leave (…) You get that one person that's like, ‘You're doing a good job. You need to stay,’ or you get that one email from a student that's like, ‘Ms. Villa, my English professor gave me an A on my first research paper.’ ‘You know, Miss Villa, I have a better relationship with my father because of you’—all these things that remind you that you're doing something that matters beyond the day-to-day.”
“I don't know if you believe in God, the universe, Buddha, or whatever. When I think of the times where an administrator had pissed me off to the point where I'm like, ‘I'm not coming back--That's it’ (…) I then bumped into somebody (…) Last year I was like, ‘I'm not coming back.’ I went to pick up my son and a student that I had in 2018 bumped into me in the street and was telling me how I impacted his life and telling my son, ‘Your mother is an amazing person.’”
“I don't know who or what it is that that is keeping me here, but those are the moments that I'm like, ‘You can't go.’”