a better response

My students often ask me why my high school experience was so good (b/c I often tell them that it was). I usually come up with something decent, but this weekend I found the right answer in an editorial by Sue Ontiveros of the Chicago Sun Times. Witness:

I've been in a lot of outstanding schools, but I've never been anywhere
that has the kind of positive vibe that pulses through 211 S. Laflin. In
visiting Whitney Young, I felt as if the message to students was: You've made
the right choice; we know you have a good mind, and we're going to make it even
better. And because this message is so loud and clear, the kids believe it
themselves.

I mean, why else would so many of them wake long before daylight and travel
from all corners of the city to get to this school? There they stand, on bus and
L stops, coming often from neighborhoods where the value of education has been
tarnished; maybe barely believed in anymore. Yet their commitment to the idea
that education is the way to a better life remains steadfast.

Their travels don't take them to a school where everyone looks just like
them, either. It's a true melting pot of white, black, Latino and Asian, but
even more than that, it's people of different economic and class backgrounds,
all coming together to do one thing: make their good minds even better. Go
through four years where you're learning and having fun with others so different
from yourself and you can't help but realize that bigoted generalizations they
might have heard about ''those people'' just don't hold.