Alumni Gifts

Last week, three Deerfield High School graduates dropped by school. They told me about their lives since we had last met, their summer and future plans, and reminisced about their time at DHS. They made my day – and my week. They gave me a gift for which I am so very grateful: a relationship after they have left my classroom and the school.

I have taught several thousand students in my many years at Deerfield. A vast majority of them say, “hello” in the hall after our class ends. Some I am able to catch for a handshake or a hug at graduation. Most vanish. What they don’t realize is how present they are for me.

I think about my former students a great deal. While they have moved on, I am still in the same place where we learned together. There are reminders of them everywhere and every day.  I pass their lockers and teach in the rooms where we learned together. And while I am curious about what has become of them, I accept that this is the way it works for teachers and students. Our relationship has a shelf life, and when it is over, most of the time, it ends.

Yet, when a student chooses to stay in touch after graduation, it is a gift beyond measure. For years, this meant students who would visit, often before or after winter break or as the school year was ending. It meant students who would send college graduation announcements, notes, or would suggest going out to coffee or lunch. I treasure these visits and moments.

Now, students have greater choice about how to stay in touch. Thanks to email and Facebook, staying in contact can be as involved as they want –and that is perfect and wonderful! Now, there are lots of degrees of contact.

This past month, I was treated with graduation pictures from colleges all over the world. I heard about former students getting jobs, getting married, having babies, traveling, and figuring out their futures. We didn’t need to meet, although several of us did.

Some of the students with whom I am in touch never shared class with me. Maybe we were in a club or perhaps spent time together in the resource center. Maybe we found each other in the hallways. Our time together at DHS, no matter what that time looked like, is chapter one. With most students, I only get chapter one.

Chapter two is beautiful. It has no homework and no grades. No attendance is taken, and no rules can be broken. This doesn’t mean it is perfect. Former students have struggled and needed help. We have worked on graduate school applications and found job contacts. Former students have come to my assistance, too – they have even helped me teach my current students!

Some alumni are now more my friends than my former students. I cannot imagine a student giving me a gift greater than a friendship that started in the classroom.

In the next few weeks, I will speak at two middle school graduations. The message I will deliver to the newly minted high school students is that, when they come to Deerfield High School, they are joining a family. Although grades, activities, and classes are important, the real foundation of everything that happens in school is the relationships they will form.

I have wonderful relationships with my colleagues. This is critical to my being able to do my job well. The relationships with students, especially after they leave the building, is a precious gift for which I am appreciative every time I see their posts on Facebook, when they call or email, or as we chat around town.

As I swing back into graduation season, my joy is renewed and my sadness softened by the community of alumni who remind me, even after they leave our classroom and school, that they are okay, still learning, and that they have saved a corner of their lives for their former teacher from which I can see their futures.

Graduation Time

Time can be measured in bars of soap or changed light bulbs. I am told for coffee drinkers, spoons mark time. I know time has passed when I need to change that pesky refrigerator filter.

Yet, as we celebrate the college graduation of our eldest child, the passage of time feels even more real. How could this be? I won’t start singing, “Is this the little girl I carried….?” but it is a question I keep asking myself.

How on earth did I go from being the at-home dad with two young children to the old man at school with one child about to be in graduate school and the other about to be a senior? Did I miss something? What happened?

A mantra in our family is that the days are long, but the years are short. This has certainly been true for us. Weeks and days seem endless, and then I look up and years have flown by. I often advise young parents to take lots of pictures, journal, and cherish the time. Blink twice and your children are taller than you – or don’t blink at all.

We are always blinking! We have jobs, responsibilities, meetings, chores, goals, and on and on. My life is far from boring. Time may fly when I am having fun, but it speeds past when life is full. Having children has filled my life with so many wonderful things, and that fullness has accentuated my shock when we arrive at these landmarks.

It is shocking to see the little child as a young adult, twenty-one years old! Often, my mental image of my children does not match the reality before me. We are all changing and growing, whatever our age. Yet, sometimes I forget and think of our family as static and unchanging. Then I have to adjust that mental picture to fit the times – and then it changes again!

Much as I love the challenge of change, it is tiring and surprising. All of a sudden, my son is shaving, driving, and doing other things he couldn’t do six seconds ago. My daughter lives far away and I am so eager for our weekly video chats that I take screen shots so I can savor them until the next week.

Yes, this means that I am getting older. We are all getting older, and that is a good thing. However, it is shocking, surprising, and challenging. I watch the parents of the daycare children come into the high school, and I long for those days. Then their children start screaming or crying or otherwise behaving like preschool children and the feeling passes.

There are new challenges to parenting children who are twenty-one and seventeen. There are new joys, too. Our relationship has changed and deepened in a way I could never have imagined when they were younger. It really does get better as they get older! 

I can’t generalize. I don’t know how this works for other people. I am still learning to embrace the process, and there are no viable alternatives. Fighting it doesn’t get me anywhere. Neither my children nor I will stay the same, and landmarks like graduation are great opportunities to celebrate and embrace time’s passage and our growth.