19-year-old Noe Rueda grew up the eldest of four siblings on Chicago’s West Side.

Here he tells his high school economics teacher, Alex Fernandez, how he started his own business at the age of eight to help his single mother get by.

For students who are struggling, sometimes the difference between success and failure can start when a teacher takes the time to listen.

In these two stories from our National Teacher’s Initiative, teachers go beyond the classroom to help their kids.

In 2004, Kate Musick was teaching third grade at T.C. Walker Elementary school in Gloucester, Virginia. When Harleé Patrick walked into the room, Musick saw a troubled child.

Harleé is now a teenager, and the two came to StoryCorps to talk about how she made it through that year.

The second story comes from Los Angeles, where 19-year-old Jose Catalan, who is studying to become a math teacher, sat down with his former high school teacher Carlos Vizcarra to talk about how they became friends.

On a fall day in 1981, Ricardo Ramirez accepted an offer to become a bishop in San Antonio, Texas.

At StoryCorps, he remembered the dozens of phone calls he made that day.

One of the first was to his grandmother Panchita Espitia.

When StoryCorps visited Danville Correctional Center in Illinois, one of the inmates who told his story was Carlos Rocha.

Carlos grew up in Chicago, and, like his brothers, joined a gang. In 1998, he was arrested for weapons possession. Just before he was to be released on bond, Carlos got into a fight with another inmate and killed him. He was sentenced to 24 years behind bars.

In 1981 Army Master Sergeant Roy P. Benavidez, a Green Beret, received the Medal of Honor for his service during the Vietnam War.

On his first tour there, he was severely injured by a land mine and told that he’d never walk again. After a year of rehabilitation, he walked out of the hospital and eventually returned to Vietnam for a second tour.

That’s when he spearheaded a daring rescue, saving the lives of eight fellow soldiers. In the process his jaw was broken and he was shot 37 times.

At StoryCorps, his daughter Yvette Benavidez Garcia and her husband, Rene, remember the aftermath of the battle.

Noramay Cadena is a mechanical engineer with several degrees from MIT.

Her family came to the U.S. from Mexico. They settled in Los Angeles where her parents worked in factories.

Vito de la Cruz’s parents were already separated when he was born, and when he was 6 months old, his father left him in the care of his 19-year-old aunt, Iris de la Cruz, a woman he called Nena.

Vito’s extended family traveled the migrant trail, finding work on farms across the United States. At 5 years old, Vito joined them in the fields. He remembers the excitement of traveling in the summers with his aunts, uncles, and grandmother from tomato fields in South Texas, to cherry orchards in Ohio, and sugar beet farms in North Dakota. During the days, they worked side-by-side, and in the evenings, they gathered together for dinner.

But their family’s migrant lifestyle was not easy; it was “equal parts hardship and poverty.” When he was 13, Border Patrol agents raided the farm where Vito and his family were working and rounded up undocumented workers. Witnessing workers’ fear of law enforcement struck a “profound chord in his being” and changed the course of his life.

Vito had always excelled in school, with Nena’s encouragement. She, herself, was the first person in the de la Cruz family to graduate high school, and she later went on to college. Following Nena’s example, Vito left South Texas for Yale University and then went on to attend law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

After law school, Vito began volunteering with the United Farm Workers union and focused the early part of his legal career on immigrant and farmworker rights. Years later, he became a federal public defender in Nevada before moving to Bellevue, Washington, where he continues to practice civil rights law.

Vito came to StoryCorps with his wife, Maria Sefchick-Del Paso, to remember how his childhood and his loving Nena shaped his future.

Vito’s story is one of 53 work stories featured in our new book, Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work, now available in bookstores.

When Francisco Preciado was six years old, his family moved from Mexico to the California. They entered the United States through the Bracero program, which, starting in 1942 and lasting more than 20 years, allowed Mexican workers to come to the U.S. to take temporary agricultural jobs.

At the time, Francisco spoke only Spanish, but he quickly learned English with the help of his teachers. This led him to dream of one day becoming a teacher himself, but financial demands and the need to support his family forced him to drop out of school and begin working full-time.

In the early 1980s, he took a job as a groundskeeper at Stanford University and was often accompanied to the college by his young son Frankie. Francisco hoped that one day Frankie would become a student at Stanford, and his dream came true with Frankie graduating from the university in 2007 with degrees in political science and Chicano(a) Studies.

Now 31 years old, Frankie is the executive director of the union that represents Stanford’s service and technical workers, and whose membership also includes his father.

Francisco and Frankie came to StoryCorps to talk about their relationship and their time together at Stanford—one as a maintenance man, the other as a student.

Alicia Beltrán-Castañeda grew up in Salinas, California, in the late 1960s. Her mother, Beatriz Béltran, was an immigrant from Mexico, and her father, Manuel, worked both as a foreman at a food packing plant and as an overseer of migrant farm workers.

Their family of seven lived in a small trailer, but by working multiple jobs, Manuel was able to save enough money to buy a plot of land on which he built a house. Alicia vividly recalls sitting on a 1950s metal stool in their living room, watching her father paint some of the walls goldenrod, and others Pepto-Bismol pink.

Manuel died when Alicia was 13, leaving their mother to raise the children alone.

Beatriz began working for the Salinas City Elementary School District as a bilingual liaison for Spanish-speaking families and the administration, and later became a coordinator for migrant worker families. Through her job, she saw the poverty many migrant families lived in.

Alicia was not as familiar with the lives of migrant farmworkers until she came home one day to find that her bed was missing--she was furious. With all of her older siblings away at college, Alicia had finally gotten her own room, and she loved her bed, which had a pink cover and lace dust ruffle. When she confronted her mother, Beatriz explained that she had given the bed to a family that had recently arrived in California from Mexico, and Alicia remembers telling her mother that she did not understanding why that was her problem. Without explanation, Beatriz told her to fill shopping bags with canned food from their pantry.

Together they drove to a house where Alicia’s bed now was, a one-room shack with a dirt floor like the ones occupied by so many other migrant worker families. There they met a woman who was laying on Alicia’s bed with her newborn baby surrounded by her four other children.

At StoryCorps, Alicia told her own daughter, Serena, 13, how meaningful that experience was for her.

Originally aired November 18, 2016, on NPR’s Morning Edition.

At the beginning of the Iraq War, nearly 40,000 members of the United States military were not citizens. Army Private First Class Diego Rincon was one of them. As a child, he had immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia with his family. He he always known he wanted to join the military, and at 19, he enlisted in the Army. Diego was deployed to Iraq in March 2003, at the beginning of the war. Just 11 days in, he was killed by a suicide bomber. Diego received U.S. citizenship on April 10, 2003--the day of his funeral. His parents, George Rincon and Yolanda Reyes, came to StoryCorps to remember him.

On June 12, 2016 a lone gunman killed 49 people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida.Among those killed was Deonka Drayton. She was 32. Deonka left behind a young son and her co-parent, Emily Addison. At StoryCorps, Emily sat down to remember her. There were hundreds of people at Pulse the night of the shooting, and some were able to escape in time.

Courtney McKinney talks to Alexandra Sanchez about finding out they are sisters through anonymous sperm donation.

John Torres Jr. talks to his friend, Abraham Guzman, about his dad’s career as a wrestler, and his legacy in and outside of the ring.

50 years after arriving in the United States from Honduras, Roy Daley sat down with his daughter Lucy and wife Ana to reminisce about his first Thanksgiving dinner.

Pedro Lopez remembers the day his mother was detained and deported in the largest single-site, single-day immigration raid in U.S. history.

Brothers Mark Carles and David Carles talk about how they’ve dealt with Mark’s cancer diagnosis at age 24.

Three generations of hospital pharmacists discuss staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic and what carrying on their family legacy means to them.

Since 2004, Jorge Muñoz has gathered with his family in their small kitchen in Queens, NY where they cook meals for those in need. Together, they’ve provided more than a 100 meals a day to day-laborers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, in the city. They’ve kept up the tradition year-round for the last 16 years providing approximately 500,000 meals – until May, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Using StoryCorps Connect, Jorge spoke with his sister, Luz, to remember the beginning of their journey and how their mother inspired them to give to those in need.

Jorge and Jessica Valdivia remember their brother, Mauricio, who passed away from COVID-19.

Carmencristina Moreno and her sister, Rosemary Selzer, remember their father, songwriter Luis M. Moreno, and the bittersweet legacy he left behind.

Isaiah Acosta talks to his mom, Tarah Acosta, about being born with life-threatening health issues and how he’s done far more than beat the odds.

Casimiro “Cas” Torres reflects on how his childhood led him to incarceration at New York City’s Hart Island, where he buried the poor and unclaimed in the country’s largest potter’s field.

Isabel and Juan Pablo Encinias remember their father, Lt. Col. Miguel Encinias, a Hispanic combat pilot that served in the U.S. Air Force during World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam.

Gianna Paniagua sits down with her mom, Lourdes Matamoros, to talk about how her life has changed following her second heart transplant.

Jason Romero suffers from a rare eye condition that causes blindness, and for years he struggled with depression. He came to StoryCorps with his youngest daughter, Sofia, to talk about how he made it through his darkest days.

After Angelina McCall left her job at a Tucson ER, she wondered if she was cut out for nursing. Then a volunteer position on the US-Mexico border helped restore her confidence.

Marilí Rodríguez García talks about the grief of losing a newborn, and how she healed working as a doula.

For years, Luis Montero-Adams and his Sister, Stephanie Machado, crossed the U.S..-Mexico border each morning with their dad to attend school in the U.S.