I f you loved high school, if high school was, like, bitchin’, and the pinnacle of your life thus far, you’re excused. Escort yourself to the self-help aisle of your local bookstore and pick up something which will help you self-diagnose the train-wreck that your life must be right now.
High school is what we call a “necessary evil.” It is necessary, for example, to teach our children to read and write and play organized (and often archaic) sports. But if we as a society began to be honest with ourselves, we would realize that the fundamentals are taught far prior to entering high school. Most kids can read and write before they’re 14 years old. They know the basics of dodge-ball (oh wait, I think we discontinued that sport because it’s mean). They are painfully aware of how their bodies do and do not function. They can probably count past 100 and do simple math. They are actually quite knowledgeable little creatures. So what is high school for? To make sure they understand symbolism in literature? To ensure a proper knowledge of molecular biology? To add calculus to the vast number of skills which will be completely unusable after graduation? Application of the Dewey Decimal System? (…we could be here all day evaluating that which is unnecessary after high school.)
18-year-olds who graduate from high school often have no idea what has just happened to them. They are so fucking tired of being in school that most of them stopped paying attention halfway through their freshman year, and they are startled to learn that this long journey through hell might finally be over. (I will add here that the semantics used in the last sentence will immediately repulse certain readers, who will then stop reading. Good riddance. Vernacular expression is a part of everyday life – get over it.)
Reality check: High school is extended day care. Parents want to be reassured that little Johnny and Susie are being taken care of while mom and dad go to their shit-filled jobs of drudgery every day. The theory is that everyone should suffer equally. But really, mom and dad want the kids to LEARN SOMETHING during school hours. What they don’t understand is that these high school students are being subjected to much more than math, English, science, history, PE and wood shop. They are being schooled in the very fundamentals of life. (Wait, I should capitalize that...) LIFE. (It’s fairly important in the context of this discussion.) The concepts and life philosophies that teenagers learn in school are far deeper than most parents understand.
This gap in understanding is usually explainable: the parents have forgotten what school is like. This is the most likely scenario. People grow up and get selective memories. High school sucks. It has always sucked. Even if you were the most popular cheerleader/quarterback/prom queen/theater star/drum major/baseballer to ever walk the halls of your building, you still had the virus. The socially-transmitted disease that lurks in every high school in every city across the nation: existential angst. Don’t lie.
Most young people begin life in the halcyon days of childhood: school pictures reflect the Lifetouch background in which we look relatively dumb and happy. Take a moment to reflect back on elementary school. What’s going on there? I’ll tell you what: recess. And holiday parties and lunch. Maybe you remember music and PE, but only because they were diversions from the norm. The farther away one gets from elementary school, the less he or she remembers and the more it turns into a slobbery love fest.
Junior high not so much. Hormones and all that.
High school is where is gets ugly (and recess goes away).
In my experience, honesty is a policy which people pretend to admire, but which they secretly hate. I make it a priority to dose people with a bit of honesty every day. This is slightly subversive on my part; the dark elements of my personality like to see people squirm. I was very dishonest as a teenager, so perhaps I am trying to reconcile that fact by bathing in truth every day (or at least some version of truth, as all facts tend to be malleable).
Back to the point - existential angst has been around has been around since humans were able to think rationally. Go back and read some Nietzsche for fun. This is a man directly channeling the teenage personality. “God is dead.” “I hate everyone.” He also said, “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Perhaps one element of the abyss is the crisis people encounter when trying to find their way from one stage in life to the next. Going from being a child to being an adult. Never underestimate radical changes in life; where do you think midlife crises originate?
Questioning our place is the world is fundamentally important to creating an advanced race of people who move beyond this egocentricity people have adopted. Perhaps since I am an American, I should point the finger at myself and my own culture. People will get defensive, but fuck them. We all know it’s true. Let me give you a prime example, which has absolutely nothing to do with formal education: Christmas. What the hell is going on there? Here was a kind old man from way back in the day trying to make the world a better place. Combine that with a Catholic Church looking for enlistees. Find some pagans celebrating around a tree already. Tie them all together and celebrate the birthday of a prophet (not on the day he was born in the Bible, but on a date the pagans were celebrating already). What does this have to do with anything? It spells out one example of a group of people’s angst affecting the future. Other examples would include (in no particular order): Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert Mugabe, Henry the VIII, Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, (insert most other world leaders here). Scale that down to people who affect teenagers disproportionately, and we can add most rock stars. The Grateful Dead led a generation of stoned, affected, lost souls; Dave Matthews took over for them when Jerry Garcia ingested too many speed balls; Rage Against the Machine took the anger and focused it for people, letting them scream out their frustration to the cd player rather than beating the shit out of someone; Elvis Presley loosened up a bunch of tight-assed kids from the fifties who were told by their parents that sexuality was evil. You see where this is going. People find a vehicle for their frustrations; that’s what we do. Teenagers have a harder time finding that vehicle because their experiences are limited. Even as a 40 year old, I have limited experiences and need to compartmentalize all the time. People are complex and often stupid, myself included. Teenagers are often (incorrectly) assumed to be stupid, when they’re often the ones most self-aware. Hyper-sensitive to others and their surroundings.
As a high school teacher, I see these kids on a daily basis. I was one of those kids. We all were. This is where we tend to veer off course from reality. And when I say “we” I mean adults. I will readily admit that I have never been to any of my high school reunions. Primarily because most of those people were assholes. I was an asshole. Perhaps Susanna Kaysen said it best when she was describing the Vermeer painting Girl Interrupted at her Music: “Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”
In high school we are pigeon-holed as being one type of person or another. Maybe a handful of people turn out the same way they were in high school, but most don’t. Remember the average life span (approximately 70) and your age in high school. 18!!! I graduated at 17! How the hell was I supposed to know that the bullshit I did in those four years would define me in the eyes of those other people in my high school for the rest of my life.
I readily admit that every child’s high experience is different in event, if not in substance. We are all exposed to the same bullshit of rules, regulations, and extraordinary demands on our time. Seven hours a day is too much. I am not complaining here as an educator, but from a student perspective. It is entirely unnecessary to spend that much time in school. I personally know teachers who spend a third of their school year checking out You Tube videos and showing movies to their students. A waste? You bet your ass. We might want to jump on board with the radicals and insist that tenure be eliminated and make teachers earn their salary like every other professional in the world.
So…
Having said all of this in advance of quitting my job, I will have to prepare for one of a few scenarios. One, I will quit in the near future and move to Barbados, Bora Bora, New Zealand, or some other far-off island nation where I will suntan all day, pick native fruits, learn to windsurf with a kite, and homeschool my smaller children. (Not a likely scenario, considering I live on a teacher’s salary.) Two, I will quit my job and subsequently lose my house (as I will no longer have a revenue source to pay for it) and have to work at Target scanning unnecessary consumer items. Or Three, I will immediately be fired for voicing my opinion about education.
And frankly, that last scenario pisses me off. I consider myself a fairly philosophical person. A thinker. Perhaps to a fault, I’ll admit. I tend to overanalyze most things in life, simply because I can, and because it seems to be a genetically inbred function of my brain. And because of this philosophical introspection, I have stumbled upon some truths about life and reality. As I stated before, one of those truths is that people fear honesty. They are repelled by it because it threatens the fabric upon which they have built their lives, marriages and careers. We all have carefully constructed selves, and when we look in the mirror every morning, we see that construction. Very rarely do we really look – take the time to gaze deeply into the soul sitting in the eyes – and when we do, it can be scary.
I have looked into the soul of my teacher persona recently and discovered some disturbing realities. I do not love my job, might be the first of those realities.
My alarm clock goes off in the morning, and every morning, I think, “Oh my god. Really? Do I have to do this again today?” This type of reaction hurts me, it really does. I might be a cold, heartless bitch sometimes, but when it comes down to the meat and bones of who I am and what I do, I know that I am a damn good teacher. I know my subject matter well, and have taught my fair share of students to think outside the box and defend their thoughts rationally and well. I also know that I have counseled many students off the proverbial (and sometimes too literal) ledge. Students in crisis seek me out, because (unlike their friends or their parents) I will not judge them. I simply provide an ear. They don’t even necessarily want advice; they just want someone to listen to their thoughts. That is why I have taught school for more than 10 years. My job is one part love of subject matter and three parts love of student interaction. Even when I am long gone from teaching, I will profoundly miss the youthful exuberance and tragic despair of teenagers. Sadly, their passion for life is lost somewhere between high school and adulthood, and I (like some kind of vampire) feed on their voracity for life. It keeps me honest, because children can see through falsity better than anyone else. They know when you’re being fake, when you don’t feel good, when you’re bullshitting them, and when what you’re saying really matters.
The point here is that teaching is incredibly important, and America is fucking it up. We are taking the neediest group of citizens (our children) and handing them a baton which is increasingly battered and broken. And the frustrating thing is that when teachers read that last sentence, they will be angry. They will feel accused and disrespected and frustrated and belittled. That is not the point. Attacking valuable teachers is not my intention, and those teachers who are good at what they do and who make a difference via their chosen profession should instinctively know that this argument does not include them. There are certainly thousands of teachers out there who give up much of themselves to make a difference in the lives of others, and those are our models, our sources of inspiration.
What’s important is that we pay attention – all of us: as teachers, as parents, and as tax payers, we all have a vested interest in the youth of America. And when you take a close look at what schools are doing: making it harder for students to fail (even when they put no effort into their education), giving teachers tenure too soon with little oversight or evaluation, substituting experience and free thought for rote and regurgitation, eliminating skill-based classes like cooking and sewing and car maintenance in favor of 68 flavors of bullshit, and treating students like prisoners in their own space, we are positioning ourselves dangerously close to the revolt (which may be inevitable). When second graders are saying they hate school; we have a problem. When out-of-school suspension is the punishment for skipping school; we are missing the point of repercussions. When junior high becomes a stomping ground for abuse, harassment, and bullying, and the teachers look the other way for fear of a lawsuit; we have lost our children.
It is time for the people of America to step up and demand the teachers earn their jobs. Cede tenure. Make education courses in college more difficult to weed out the slackers. Require a master’s degree in their subject area. Make administrators get out of their offices and get them into the classrooms to see what’s going on. Keep teachers on their toes, myself included.
We don’t need to standardize tests to judge the intelligence of our children; we need to standardize the level of expectation we have of the students, their teachers, and the parents who expect those teachers to be a surrogate parent for seven hours out of every day.
In short, we need to remember ourselves at five, at ten, at 14 and at 18, and we need to be respectful of the learning process and bring our students back from the abyss.
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