When Lem Wheeles was 17 years old, he met then President Bill Clinton on the White House steps during a school trip to Washington, D.C. As he shook Clinton’s hand, “It just struck me, like, this is just another dude,” he said. “This is just another human being on the other side of that handshake.”
As a government and history teacher at A.J. Dimond High School in Anchorage, Alaska, Wheeles tries to carry that lesson forward. He wants his students to understand that government is made up of people.
“I think it’s easy for students, and it’s easy for adults as well, to just think of the government as this abstract thing out there that does stuff to them, as opposed to something that they can be a part of,” he said.
Wheeles regularly has elected officials, ambassadors, and others visit his classroom, and he hopes that his students might go on to occupy some of those positions. “I am confident that someday I’ll have a former student in an elected office,” he said. “We want people to step up and be engaged.”