Hello Friends…
…And there goes the 2012-13 school year, and with it another graduating class. They have their whole lives ahead of them now. Careers. Love. Friendships. Mortgages. Wrong choices and not-so wrong ones. Really wrong choices. A potentially endless horizon of possibilities. And they’ll be successful too… most of them, anyway. As long as they learn to adapt to the real world, instead of expecting some irrational manifestation of the complete alternative.
But if they can do that, if they can learn to pick and ultimately fight their own battles, if they can learn to forgo their parents as the increasingly antiquated last line of defense that they actually are, and if they can learn to identify personal responsibilities and accomplish creating individualized agendas, they can do almost anything. Just think, they’ve already done so much. They’ve beaten the odds, they’ve triumphed over curriculums and state standards and peer pressures, all during the potentially most emotionally turbulent time of their lives. And they did it all without the luxury of a Baz Luhrmann or Vitamin C anthem.
They gave their all to get where they are, only to find that life has yet even to begin. And it hasn’t for them. Not technically. Their lives are just beginning and blah, blah, blah…
… enough about them already. It isn’t just their day, you know. It’s ours too. The educators and faculty who raised this graduation class up to this culturally prestigious precipice. The ones who guided them to this glorious moment in the sun. And we’ll do it all over again next year. And the following year after that. And so on and so. And we’ll do it not because we’re supposed to, or get paid to, but simply because we want to. In many cases, have to. Because many of us have this innately undying need to teach, to educate, to elevate. Because someone once passed the baton to us, and it affected us few so greatly that we decided to stay behind and help pass it to all future generations.
Allow me to explain.
This was the first time I had students graduate.
… not like you’re thinking, or how that sounded. I’m so bad at my job that none of my students have ever graduated. I just predominantly work with seventh and eighth graders, and after five years working within the same district, finally got to see the very first batch of my students graduate.
It was surreal, to say the least. For the first time in my fledgling career I felt like I had actually contributed to something of a finished product. That my ultimate affect on these students, no matter how small or large, could have actually affected them on some larger scale, on their eventual contribution to society. Which got me thinking about their coming journeys, and the enormity of the world awaiting them. Which then, in turn, got me thinking about my own future, and how vastly different the two were.
Every school year ends the same for us. The hallways ultimately empty of students, once again giving way to all the surreal normalcies of a high school faculty closing up shop after yet another ten months of business. Underappreciated custodial staffs scrub away another year’s worth of ill-fated adolescent romances graffitied upon locker doors and desk surfaces. Cafeteria workers wipe down presumably sanitary workstations with rags most likely brimming with some unjustly disproportionate concoction of Ebola and Pledge, before packing away yesterday’s mystery meat burritos for September’s meatloaf prep [citation needed]. And a flurry of causally dressed educators converse smally, grading last-minute efforts and maneuvering classrooms while trying desperately to avoid what is typically an overabundance of present superiors.
We eventually go home. Just for a bit. But our watchful eye always rests on that calendar. Then, like that, the day comes and we start over again. A new school year. A new crop of minds to help mold. A new opportunity to pick up arms as the gatekeepers, standing guard upon the threshold that divides high school and the real world. We fill their minds with knowledge and then let them pass into life, like blood cells brimming with oxygen and coursing through a host. And once they’ve dissipated into the system, we rinse and repeat.
It’s almost as though, sometimes, we’re stuck in a limbo of sorts. Watching the times and cultures change around us just as much as the faces, but always maintaining the course, always seeing our purpose through. The perpetual hallway dwellers who never really could leave high school, so they didn’t. All because someone once passed a baton on to us, and it affected us few so greatly that we decided to stay behind and help pass it on to future generations. We took the charge onto our own. And now each graduation day is just as much ours as it is the students’. Sure they’ll forge the new society, but only with the foundation we had implemented.
Live, Love, Learn,
Steven &