One of the many things I envy about teachers is the joy they feel when students come back to tell them how grateful they are for what they were taught. Journalists like me don't get visits like that, but I received an e-mail last week that was almost as good.

It came from Greg Rusu, whom I met 18 years ago when he was a senior at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. He was one of the many students of Jaime Escalante, the soon-to-be-famous math teacher I was writing a book about. I was very impressed with Rusu, but soon lost track of him.

Thank God for Google, the Web search engine that is so efficient in reestablishing old ties. Rusu told me he was searching for the addresses of old friends when he idly typed in his own name -- it is an important clue to the kind of person he is that he had not done this before -- and found on the top of the list an article I had written in 1998 mentioning him prominently. "I want to thank you for the kind words," he said to me in the e-mail.

Then he told me the story of what happened to him after high school.

I think every person's life is interesting. That is why I am such a fan of The Washington Post obituaries page. But Greg's tale is particularly intriguing because it dramatizes two points that great educators have been trying to drum into my head for two decades: (1) you have to let students take risks, even if you think it is going to hurt them; and (2) what counts in the end is not a student's grade point average or his parents' money or his college's rank on the U.S. News & World Report list, but the quality of his character.

I remembered Rusu as a quiet boy with square features and short brown hair who got to the United States despite the Romanian government's efforts to put his father in jail. Then he enrolled in Escalante's calculus class despite a strenuous effort by his counselor and the head of his magnet program to keep him out of it.

His father, a veterinary researcher, had gotten into political trouble in Communist Romania when his report on the environmental damage done by huge cooperative ranches reached the West. He was first put on a political blacklist. Then the authorities tried to manufacture a criminal charge to take him off the Carter administration's list of Romanians whose human rights were being violated -- an issue that was holding up a trade pact between the two countries. Rusu's father launched a hunger strike and the government expelled him and his family when Rusu was eight.

There was not much money and young Rusu struggled in school, but he began to improve in eighth grade and was allowed into Garfield's computer science magnet program. Many Garfield administrators did not like Escalante. They thought he worked his students too hard to pass the AP tests. They feared that all the fragile adolescents from immigrant families, mostly Mexican, that made up the Garfield student body would burn up and drop out. They were appalled that Escalante had let Rusu take trigonometry and math analysis without having had the prerequisite second year algebra course, just so he could take calculus his junior year. Escalante had handed Rusu the proper form without even looking up, since he never got in the way of a student who wanted to do more work than was required.

The magnet program director told Rusu: "Don't try to grow up too fast. If you invest all that time, you're going to flunk all your other classes. Your grade-point average will go down. Nobody's gonna give you scholarships. Your parents are going to get mad."

Rusu took calculus anyway, getting the top score on the AP exam his junior year and again the top score on the advanced calculus AP exam his senior year. He received a scholarship to Harvey Mudd College, a splendid science and engineering school in Claremont, Calif. That being the last I heard of him, I figured he was set for life.

But risk-takers like Rusu have more interesting lives than the rest of us, and his college days did not go smoothly. "At HMC three general things happened as near as I can tell," he said, "(1) culture shock (I got introduced to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, doing my own laundry, and just basically responsible for all the 'little things' that gave my day structure), (2) I'm convinced the profs were out to get me -- like they had a quota or something, and (3) I was still trying to keep in touch with my friends from Garfield (too many trip into town.)"

"When I turned to my advisor for guidance to get my bearings and get traction in the program," he said, "I was told that I should probably just go to the nearby trade school."

He left Harvey Mudd and found work in the computer business, first in Compton and then in Silicon Valley. He got his bachelor of science degree in computer science, magna cum laude, at National University in San Jose, seven years after graduating from high school, by attending class at night while he worked full time as a business systems analyst for Advanced Micro Devices in Santa Clara.

Dropping out of Harvey Mudd bothered him for a while. He was eventually reunited with one of his freshman roommates, who had gone on to graduate school at Stanford University, when the man got a job at Advanced Micro Devices. "I had been there for eight years or so already, but somehow felt compelled to apologize to him for my former self," Rusu said.

But he says he now realizes how much he learned doing it his way, against the advice of people who did not know him as well as he knew himself. He is a product marketing manager at Dell in Round Rock, Tex., near Austin. He leads a team that figures out what customers are dissatisfied about and fixes the problem. He has a good life. He still talks about the day in 1998 when he was introduced on the stage of a big computer conference to former president Jimmy Carter as the successful son of that persistent Rumanian dissident who owed Carter his freedom. He surprised his father and the rest of his family with the video that was made of that introduction, producing hugs and tears as the tape was played again and again.

He says he had come to believe that the process by which we acquire education, through parents, siblings, schools and life experiences, is as important as the knowledge we gain. He remembers Carter's message at the conference -- not to leave anyone behind in the Information Age -- and thinks he is doing that by making computers easier to use.

"Like Escalante pushing calculus to the disenfranchised inner-city school students," he said, "I see my role as pushing computing for the non-techies so that they too can participate . . . bridging this educational gap."

As Rusu sees it, his adventures have only begun. "The world keeps changing," he said, "and I need to grow beyond high-tech." He thinks the Duke MBA program might be good for him, if it is demanding enough. "I now have two kids of my own," he said, "and have already started to teach them how school really works and what learning is really all about."