Like parents, teachers can shape not just a child's experience in the world but also the very essence of who they are.

Stumble into a class with a bad teacher and the encounter might stick with you forever.

To wit: I'm a grown woman with kids of my own, and I still remember my 8th-grade social studies teacher, who, on the first day of school, made fun of my exotic-sounding Greek last name and told the giggling class that it sounded like a disease.

But the right one can transform your very being.

Mr. Hopkins was my 10th-grade English teacher. On his wall, he had a "no hunting" sign. By "hunting," he meant to humiliate or tease.

"You aren't allowed to hunt each other," he explained on the first day.

In the parlance of today's culture, he was telling us that his class was a safe space.

I thought about Mr. Hopkins the other day as I watched the "Murder 101" limited series documentary on Amazon Prime. It's ostensibly true crime, but you could make a good argument that it's actually a documentary about teachers, and the way they can change a kid's life for the better.

"Murder 101" follows the 2025 sociology class of Alex Campbell, a teacher at Elizabethton High, a small-town Tennessee school in the Appalachian Mountains.

Mr. Campbell, as his kids call him, uses cold cases to teach sociology in project-based learning. Throughout the season, the students investigate decades-old murders, researching victims and suspects, accessing public records and collaborating with state law enforcement assigned to the cases.

Without spoiling, I can tell you that though the framework of the show is ostensibly about their investigation, it's far more about the impact that Mr. Campbell has on the children in his class, many of whom come from families torn apart by drug addiction, poverty and abandonment.

You watch the group progress throughout the year and see the ways that the class helps them navigate their challenges.

Some of the kids featured in the series are a foster child with an imprisoned father, the orphaned daughter of a woman who struggled with drug addiction, a bullied girl who found her voice and a popular jock feeling lost as he approaches adulthood.

But you'll learn through the documentary that these are just stereotypes and fail to capture the complexity of a life — even a young one.

Like the victims of the murders they study, the students are much more than what happened to them.

One of the murder victims, a mother of three, worked as a prostitute before her death, and you can see the fierceness in one of Mr. Campbell's students as she says that she would do anything for her children, too.

In news stories, on social media and in everyday life, it can be tempting to pass judgment. The climate of our culture virtually demands it.

What do you think of this makeup?

What do you think of this diet?

What do you think of this parenting technique?

Those implied or explicitly stated questions are how we're hooked into commenting. We have a powerful urge to believe that we can control our own fates.

If you hear about a woman who was murdered, it can be scary to think that it could happen to anyone. It's much safer to believe that it was her fault, that she invited her fate with her choices or lifestyle, and that our choices and lifestyles protect us from any similar danger.

The alternative is justifiable fear, knowing that we cannot prevent bad things from happening — in fact, that bad things probably will happen to us, at some point in our lives, as Mr. Campbell acknowledges to the class in one episode.

But if we allow that fear into our hearts, compassion will sneak in beside it.

Compassion for others, of course, but also compassion for ourselves.

Because the lessons that Mr. Campbell teaches these kids are that we did not deserve the bad things that happened to us and that, perhaps more importantly, those bad things do not have to define us.

We can be more than a bullied girl, a foster kid, a jock, an orphan or a murder victim. We, and they, become a full picture rather than a stereotype by being known, by being understood.

These both are and are not sociology lessons. They are also lessons about life, and about how to become the best version of yourself, which really is the only thing worth learning in school anyway.

It's enough to make you wish you were back in high school.

Photo credit: Quilia at Unsplash