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From NPR news, this is weekend edition. I'm Lian Hanson.

I believe in mystery.
I believe in family.
I believe in being who I am.
I believe in the power of failure.
And I believe / normal life is extraordinary.
This I Believe.

For our series This I Believe, we hear today from Michael Oatman. He pened this essay for a writing class in Cleveland. Oatman is one course away from a Master's of Fine Arts. Ten years ago, a master's degree would have seemed out of the question for Michael Oatman and anyone who knew him. Here's series curator independent producer Jay Allison.

Michale Oatman told us that until recently he worked at jobs he didn't like and wasn't good at, like pumping jet fuel, or as he called it, a glorified bouncer at Tweakman Centres. Oatman describes himself as, quote, menacing, 320 pounds dreadlocks and the shoulders of a lionbacker. But it was in the aftermath of wring a poem that he came to this belief, as you will hear in his essay for This I Believe.

I believe that education has the power to transform a person's life. For me, education was the rabbit hole through which I escaped the underclass. I squeezed my 300-pound frame through that hole expecting others to follow, and instead I find myself in a strange new land, mostly alone, and wondering at this new life. For instance, these days for me, dramatic plays at local arts centers have replaced strip pole dancing at the local sleaze huts. I haven't fondled a stripper in years because now I see the stripper through eyes informed by feminist theory. It's hard to get excited when you're pondering issues of exploitation.

I still wonder what happened to that happy-go-lucky semi-thug that used to hang out with drug dealers on dimly-lit street corners. Well, I'm in the library parsing a Jane Austen novel looking for dramatic irony, while many of my old friends are dead or in jail. I was lucky because I didn't get caught or killed doing something stupid. When I was on the streets, I never felt I was good at anything, but I wrote this poem about a girl who didn't care about me, and it got published. I knew nothing about grammar or syntax, so I went back to school to learn that stuff, and one thing led to another.

It's odd to educate oneself away from one's past. As an African-American male, I now find myself in a foreign world. Like steam off of a concrete sidewalk, I can feel my street cred evaporating away, but I don't fight it anymore. Letting go of the survival tools I needed on the street was a necessary transaction for admittance to a better life.

I am still fighting, but in different ways. I've learned the benefit of research and reading, of debate and listening. My new battlefields are affirmative action, illegal immigration and institutional racism.

I believe I am the living embodiment of the power of education to change a man. One day soon, a crop of fresh-faced college students will call me professor. I may even be the only black face in the room, the only representative of the underclass. I may feel the slight sting of isolation, but I'll fight it off because I believe in the changes that my education has allowed me to make.

Michael Oatman with his essay for This I Believe. Last month, Oatman told us he ran into the girl he wrote the poem about, and he thanked her. And twenty minutes before we recorded this essay, he got a new job, teaching playwriting to young people at risk.

We invite everyone to write for our series. You can find out all about it at npr.org/thisibelieve or call toll free 888-577-9977. For This I Believe, I'm Jay Allison.

Next week for the monthly online edition of This I Believe, an essay for Father's Day, it comes from listener Chris Huntington who teaches in a man's prison in Indiana and believes in adoption.

This I Believe is independently produced by Jay Allison, Dan Gediman, John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

Support for This I Believe comes from Prudential Retirement.

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