The children wanted to play the Bit Monster game. “You can do it, Mr. Phil,” they said after he told them no, he had lesson plans and preparations for that afternoon’s field trip. They repeated: “You can do it, Mr. Phil!” He gave in, walked outside with the kids and sat on the big toy behind the Martin Luther King Jr. Family Outreach Center. The children pulled him off that toy. That was the Bit Monster game. A simple game, yet after playing it Mr. Phil was surprised how fast the lesson plans got finished.

It was the summer of 1997. Phil High-Edward was 25. He had a college degree in social work, both his parents were social workers in the Tri-Cities, and he had accepted the summer teaching job at MLK as a temporary stop before diving into the profession. But later in the Monster Bit day, as he walked with the students in Lincoln Park, Phil realized his true calling. He was meant to be a teacher.

He decided that day to return to college and get his teaching certification, because up until that summer with the MLK kids, he had never experienced a job where he wanted to go in early and stay late, where time sped faster than the clock. Phil followed his call, and he has been an English teacher at Lewis and Clark High School since 2002.

I got to know Phil during his life-changing summer because we taught a writing class together once a week at the MLK center. Last week, after we hadn’t seen each other in a decade, we teamed up again.

Phil and I sat in my office and looked at photos of “our” students and the essays they wrote in 1997. The students in our fourth-to-seventh grade group were mostly from low-income, struggling homes. But some, such as the children of Spokane pastor Lonnie Mitchell, were not. The children remain in our hearts and memories to this day.

I told Phil I’ve always wondered what happened to 10-year-old Jeana, who sobbed as she hugged me the last day of class. She was moving to live with an aunt in Idaho. In an essay we published in the newspaper, she wrote: “I am a good kid in class. I am a foster child. I am sad about that. I am sad about my mom.”

Phil has often wondered about the fate of Patrick, 10, who wrote: “I am a loud mouth in class. I am an A.D.D. child. I am fine with it. I am a smart kid.”

About Patrick, the other MLK kids and the at-risk children he has taught through the years, Phil said, “You don’t really stop worrying about them. They are always in your mind. Are they OK? Some of them had such a hard road. The odds were stacked up against them.”

To the MLK kids from the summer of 1997: We taught you long ago. Now you are young adults. We’d like to know how your lives turned out. What you remember of our time together. Did any of the lessons make a difference? We wish for you to be our teachers now. This is our call. Please answer.