Teenage Years

Teaching high school kids is like getting a do-over on your own teenage years. Mine weren’t particularly awesome, so I’m generally glad for the opportunity.

I spent middle school hanging out with the kids who skipped school and smoked cigarettes, and I convinced myself I had a lot of angst. I was angry with my parents, although I have absolutely no idea why. One day, I ran away. It was a great adventure for about six hours, until my mom pulled up beside me as I walked down the street late at night. She didn’t say a word, just opened the door. Automatically, I got in and went home.

In ninth grade, she made me tryout for a swim club. I loved the water and grew up swimming in the lake at my grandparents’ house, but that didn’t prepare me for competitive swimming. I nearly drowned trying to figure out how to do flip-turns on that interminable afternoon. Dozens of other kids, spread out over six lanes, swam laps around and around me. The coach was merciless and without humor, and her swimmers were unbelievable--intimidating in their endurance and strength. At the time I didn’t understand why my mom would humiliate me like that, and I have no idea what she had to do to convince the coach to let me join the team, but she did it. I was terrified and my mom was thrilled. She seemed to know that swimming would save me, and she forced me to keep going back until I started going back on my own. 

That year I stopped hanging out with the kids who were skipping school. I stopped pretending that smoking and drinking and being angry at my parents was cool, and I started doing laps. For the first time in my life, I had an identity. And just after I started to sort that out, we had to move. 

My parents worried any gains would be lost--that my nascent confidence and sense of self would disappear and I’d slip back into my old ways. In an attempt to avoid that, they moved us to a town that had a swim team, so I could keep swimming and hopefully stay out of trouble. After we were settled into our new house, and I started classes at my new school (of about 1300 kids), we learned the swim team was only for boys. I don’t remember processing that setback with them, but I do have a clear recollection of their consistent message for me through all those challenging years: you can do anything you set your mind to. Eventually I was the captain of the boys’ swim team, and by my senior year, there was a separate team just for girls. My mom never missed a single meet.

In spite of the few small victories of my high school years, I remember that time to be primarily a battle. In part this was due to the fact that, by the time we moved, I had come to believe that right and wrong were very distinct things. As a teenager that was really confusing at times, especially when I took my beliefs out of my house and into the world. The only good thing about being a black and white thinker is that choices are easy to make; peer pressure never bothered me, but I know part of the reason for that is because my mom was always there to back me up--she was always cheering me on. In high school, after we moved, I had no problem standing up for what I believed. I spent a lot of time standing up, but I didn’t have a lot of people standing with me, other than her. And when I had a hard time dealing with the gray world around me, my mom was there to translate what I didn’t understand. 

I don’t know if it’s ironic that I’ve ended up teaching high school English, or inevitable. 
What I do know is that I understand the world a bit better now, and spending my days in a high school, surrounded by high school kids, allows me to look back on my own experiences with better perspective. In between conversations about books, or trying to explain what makes a good thesis statement, I have a lot of opportunities to hang out with kids and talk with them about what’s going on in their lives. Always I am reminded of those same conversations I had with my mom. 

Sometimes I have a chance to offer some perspective, for whatever it’s worth. But just as often the kids help me see what I wasn’t able to see when I was a kid myself: that the process of making sense of it all is a pretty incredible process. Not easy, per se, but incredible. As a kid, I wanted to get through it just as quickly as possible. I wanted to advance beyond the murkiness of adolescence, to what I imagined would be a more black and white adulthood. But watching my students every day, it’s easy to see the beauty in what they are in the process of doing: becoming themselves. 

My mom didn’t warn me that adulthood would be confusing sometimes too, at least if she did I don’t remember it. But fortunately I had enough time with her to internalize the key messages: Solve problems, don’t run away from them. Work hard. Have confidence. Believe in yourself. Stand up for what you believe. Set goals high. Do the things you imagine doing. Celebrate the victories.

In the course of each school year I watch kids struggle to make sense of the gray world and try to find their places in it. Many of their struggles are the age-old struggles, but for the kids doing the struggling, the struggles are brand new. There is a lot for them to sort out: What values, of the many imparted by parents, and peers, and our culture as a whole, do they value for themselves? What personal boundaries do they have? And what goals? What aspects of their character will be their armor? And where are the weak spots? How should they comport themselves? And what expectations should they have of other people around them? Who will validate them in life, and who will condemn them? And of those, who matters most? Or at all?

I do my best to give good counsel when I’m asked, and knowing that I still think back to some of the things my own high school teachers told me, I am cognizant each day of the incredible responsibility it is to be one of the voices they hear as they try to answer the big questions for themselves. And as I’m trying to sort out what to say, my mother’s voice is still, every day, in my ear. Somedays I come home and feel I’ve done an okay job, and other days I wish I could revise something I’ve said or done. But every day, I come home and think about what a privilege it is to be part of the process--no matter how peripheral my role is. And every day still I wish I could pick up the phone and talk it over with my mom.