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"No. Oh. Yeah." "OK, let me tell you something. You're in a room with big women. I'm proud of my bigness. You understand what I'm saying? It's inappropriate. Is someone going around calling your mama a big woman?" He stares at his binder, a windstorm of crumpled papers, and nods. "Well, who is it?" "A man." "Some man? Me and you are gonna have a conversation. We'll talk about him later. You don't like it, do you?" He shakes his head no. "So don't bring it here. You're disrespecting her. But I'm going to take care of (the home situation) for you." Silence. She'll call his house later. For now, the one-woman Fast and Furious movie switches gears, cuts to comedy. "You're probably gonna marry (a big woman). Skinny women are a dime a dozen." Laughter shakes their shoulders. A lot of what O'Bannon-Morton does could classify as social/ emotional learning, based on the idea that emotional skills are crucial to academic performance. If a child can't process tough emotions, his or her brain is consumed, too busy to tackle long division. "She has an innate ability to know how to make every kid vulnerable and valuable," says Keith Look, a former Meyzeek principal from 2003 to 2008. "No one can do what she does." Look has a favorite story about O'Bannon-Morton. A warm smile emerges from behind his graying beard as he shares. A student arrived at Meyzeek from Mississippi with a thick Delta accent and a tendency to grab at girls. When he frst sat in O'Bannon-Morton's class he spouted that he hoped to move back to Mississippi so he could sell drugs with his uncle. "Well, you got to be able to do math to do the drugs right, because you don't want anyone to come get you because you miscounted their money," she replied, unfazed. When the boy's aggression toward girls worried administrators, O'Bannon-Morton had an idea. She started giving him bear hugs, a head-on-her-chest, bicep swaddle, grandmotherly sort of squeeze. Tat little bit of smothering, it worked. He came to expect the daily embrace, dropping his head, opening his arms the moment he saw O'Bannon-Morton. If he got that hug, it tamed his impulses. "He'd be fne the rest of the day. Simple as that," Look says, still amazed years later. "Tat was the key. He could've been kicked out." Instead, he made it to Atherton High School, played on the football team. During one of his football games he got angry Atherton was losing and started throwing fsts at the other team's players. Security was called. Coaches tried to split it up. Ten O'Bannon-Morton, who sat in the stands, ran on the feld yelling his name. "Get your tail over to your side of the feld and take your loss," she ordered. And so he did. "She has an innate ability to know how to make every kid vulnerable and valuable," says Keith Look, a former Meyzeek principal. S haronda Lynn Smith was born less than a mile from Meyzeek Middle School at the old Methodist Evangelical Hospital on East Broadway. It was a pleasant spring morning, May 8, 1968. Just four pounds 14 ounces, she showed up several weeks early, surprising her young, single mother. Her early childhood was spent living with her mother and grandmother in the old Sheppard Square housing projects. Later, when her mother, Gail, married her father, Larry O'Bannon Sr., the family moved to a street lined with bungalows just steps from Shelby Park. Te O'Bannons remain a close, church-every-Sunday family. To this day, O'Bannon-Morton, her parents, two siblings and all the grandkids travel on summer vacation together. Her mom, a slightly shorter, older version of Sharonda, raised her children with strict rules and high expectations. O'Bannon-Morton instructs students frst thing on a Monday morning. 11.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 61