…Kids ;-\It’s so strange. On the same hallway, you see little girls steal a rolling chair from a teacher’s classroom to chariot each other down the hall, and then you see a jaded young woman with a bulging stomach damning her deadbeat baby-daddy (who’s also on the hall). On the same hallway, you see little boys with Power Rangers bookbags and light-up sneakers, and you simultaneously see young men in sports coats and blazers who are joint-enrolled at the local college and drive luxury cars. Students talking about the latest Grand Theft Auto installment adjacent to students talking about their tax refunds. And then the bell rings… and they all file into the same classroom.
At the high school level, not only do we lump students of drastically different learning types into the same classroom and expect teachers to reach them all--- we lump children and young adults into the same classroom and tell the children to grow up while telling the young adults to stay in a child’s place. “…YOU ARE A CHILD! …YOU ARE A CHILD!” I’ve heard many an assistant principal say this to a wayward student who was showing out. For the ones who are truly “kids”, it works; for the “young adults”, not so much. There’s nothing like telling a student, “Be thankful you don’t have bills to pay” and hearing back, “Oh, I don’t even live with my parents right now; I live with my boyfriend, and we do pay bills, thank you.”
…Kids ;-\
But that’s the lite version of the story… brace yourself. The big propaganda wave right now is exposing teacher-student sex scandals; if you think that’s bad, just wait until America finds out what’s going on in high school bathrooms between the students, especially in the middle of a social push for LBGT rights and acceptance. Search Facebook long enough, you’ll find some quite disturbing videos being posted by “the little darlings”; videos that
will make you WISH they were only uploading street fights. And as much as we educators do to sanitize and shelter kids while they’re in the school environment, how do we stop the real world from setting in when one of their fellow students gets murdered--- which is exactly what happened in the opening weeks of the 2013-2014 school year at one of my chosen schools. In 5 years of teaching between two high schools, I’ve seen my students have to process 5 murders, 2 automobile deaths, and a life claimed by a freak heart condition--- I literally saw this kid smiling one day, and the very next day she was gone. How’s this for context: I’m an alumnus of the same school system, and in 13 years I had only experienced the loss of 2 classmates, one I never even met.In an age when it seems like vile acts and tragedies happen so often, I’ve gotta tell ya--- you see a lot more young adults on campus and a lot less …kids.
Do you see what’s happening here? It’s simple: our high school students are split between a real world that puts many of them into adult situations, and a classroom that ignores this while attempting to conform and streamline them. We tell them to avoid profanity, pull their pants up, get an education, say no to drugs, “be responsible”, go to college--- but after school they go home and watch Friday with parents, pseudo-parents, and other adults who cuss, drink, smoke, f[ornicate] and dress any kind of way.
We teach things that “will come in handy someday” to students who are looking for something to help them sustain and feed themselves “today” and “tomorrow”. We set boundaries inside of our schools that many times are not reinforced once the students leave the campus, which creates moral contradictions in the minds of the students. And I don’t think people really understand the implications of all this--- it means we have a high school educational experience that, for many of our students, does not help them to cope with, much less shape, the reality in which they live. The world that they go home to literally trivializes the classroom, making the whole experience almost patronizing. And the students KNOW they’re being patronized, even though they can’t articulate it.
I’m borrowing the term “double-consciousness” from W.E.B. DuBois, who coined the term in reference to any African American who has awareness of his African heritage, yet has been groomed and educated according to Eurocentric socialization. In this case, I’m using the term to refer to 1) any high school student who, due to life circumstances, is no longer a child off campus, but must assume a childlike role while on campus; 2) any high school student who has not yet matured, yet finds themselves pressured to mature while on campus.America, we’ve got to understand something: when communities can’t agree on what’s appropriate for children to be exposed to at home, reaching students becomes a crapshoot for teachers. When I was in training to become a teacher, we learned about the psychological and physiological changes students experience as they transition from elementary school to middle school to high school. According to the training--- which nowadays is mostly useless, by the way--- middle school is supposed to be the “therapeutic stage”, where students are just entering puberty and approaching young adulthood. By the time they reach high school, they’re traditionally set in their ways and transitioning into the adult phase. Nowadays--- at least in my neck of the woods--- this is often not the case. So many come out of middle school either far too immature for high school, or far too “advanced” or “experienced” to take high school seriously. And the middle group… they’re the ones who constantly have the “Is this the end of civilization??” looks on their faces as they walk the hallways. The ones who probably find The Walking Dead deeply humorous.
Funny story: I had a kid once that gave me hail, fire, and brimstone when she was in my class. Near the end of the year, she totally transformed on me and gave me no further trouble… just outta the blue! So that made me curious; one day I sat on the corner of her desk, and I just asked her straight-up:
“…Why didn’t we get along this whooole year until now?”
‘Know what she told me?
“Oh, it wasn’t time for me to be mature yet; I was waiting on my 17th birthday.”
“…Your 17th birthday??”
“Yep.”
“So you mean to tell me, you could’ve been behaving all this time---”
“Yep.”
“---but you just had a specific date set aside.”
“Yep.”
“…Arright. …Cool.” I died three times that day; thank God for birthdays. …Kids ;-\
‘See what just happened there? How this discussion just went from extremely heavy to extremely light? That’s what it feels like teaching high school in a society that raises its children in a constant state of moral flux. Communities don’t agree on how children ought to be raised, then dump the responsibility of upholding the highest moral standards on the schools; a responsibility that we, of course, accept--- “The Noble Profession” and such. But for the students who are caught in-between, they have to reconcile why the real world doesn’t operate the way the schools operate… or why the schools don’t operate the way the real world operates. How seriously can one take an education that bears no resemblance to the reality he or she knows?
Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It’s a good book, you should read it; I’ll be referencing it often in my future posts. Once you read it, then we can chat about it. #HERELIESEDUCATION@earlgreysummers on Twitter
earlgreysummers@gmail.com
/earl.g.summers
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