Kryptonite: Altman says he struggles with taking care of himself, saying that when he has so many minds to care for and nurture, staying on top of his own life is hard, a feeling which Perez-Rhym knows all too well. “Realizing you can do more by doing less” is her weakness, and focusing her energies is her struggle.

“Learning is a political act,” says Ian Altman. Recently, he and Melissa Perez-Rhym were both teaching, simultaneously, their English students about the Arizona law banning a Mexican studies course and the consequences of that action. The Arizona law deals with issues not far from those faced by many Clarke County students.

The two high-school teachers, Altman of Clarke Central and Perez-Rhym of Cedar Shoals, are involved in U-Lead Athens, with Perez-Rhym serving as the head. The injustice-fighting pair, along with volunteer mentors from high schools and the University of Georgia, helps “under”-documented students work toward a future of higher education.

Altman stresses that they don’t refer to the students as “un”-documented because they do have paperwork and aren’t here illegally, but they are denied educational opportunities that are available to peers who have grown up alongside them. Often they’ve grown up across the street, quite literally, from one of the top-tier schools in Georgia, UGA, which, under Board of Regents policy 4.1.6, is off-limits to immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally, even at a young age.

A Macon native, Altman came to Athens to study philosophy at UGA. His choice of major led him to his career as an English teacher and mentor with U-Lead. “It’s better to know than not to know,” is his philosophy, and when he isn’t chatting up the alpacas at Sweet Olive Farm with his wife, he’s dedicated to helping college hopefuls not only gain knowledge, but want to gain it, because when students choose what to learn, they learn more, he believes.

Altman says the most difficult thing for the students “is dealing on the daily with the unfairness.” But then he teaches them to tear things apart. That’s Altman’s superpower, which he uses to challenge his students both in class and on Thursday nights at U-Lead. Destruction allows him to teach his students this in a way that challenges everything they’ve been taught. By tearing ideas apart and letting the kids try to put them back together, it teaches them to think critically, such as analyzing an “American identity”—what that entails, if there is such a thing and what that means to their own experience.

One of the most important things for students now is “being taught to examine the system and to challenge the system,” says Perez-Rhym. Her combined superpowers of multi-tasking and empathy help her engage with her students, whom she feels connected to because of her own Latino heritage. A Miami native who came to Athens after a few years in Madison, her mother told her, “You became Hispanic when you moved from Miami.” In Miami, Perez-Rhym “was a minority but not a minority,” she says, because of the large Latino population there. “I never thought about my Latino identity as a thing, which is, I guess, what it’s like to be white everywhere else.”

These two superheroes aren’t braggers, attributing the success and hopes of their work to the many mentors and teachers who are fighting for their students just the same. “I don’t think that what I do is different from what any other teacher in our school system does,” Perez-Rhym says. “There are so many things that as educators we’re involved in or advocate for in our own ways, supporting our students.”