I Am Finally Graduating From High School

I spent the conventional four years in high school and then another four in college. Then I went back to high school and stayed for thirty-three years. I can now tell the world that, at the end of this school year, I am finally going to graduate. It is a strange feeling.

Of course, I have been anticipating my retirement for a long time. When I first started teaching, many of my colleagues were on the verge of retirement and their discussion of it seemed banal and boring. The younger teachers would kick each other under the table and laugh at the constant retirement talk. “Get on with it and retire already,” we’d joke. I hope I have kept my retirement comments to a minimum.

A friend had a retirement countdown clock that sat on her desk. She knew exactly how many weeks, days, and hours until her retirement arrived. I have a confession: I do have an app that does that on my phone. I look at it every so often. But I promise you, I am not reciting my countdown to anyone. and I want to see if I can slow down that clock, not speed it up.

This year is a series of “lasts.” My last first day of school. My last open house night. My last set of new students – and so on. Not that I needed a way to understand my seniors, but I am certainly identifying with them. Like first semester seniors, my post-high school plans are still in flux and I have not nailed down all the details. Unlike the seniors, I don’t see myself moving from one school to another. I don’t think I will pick up and teach at a private school or substitutes teach at mine.

I don’t know what is it like to NOT be a teacher. A great deal of my identity is wrapped up in school, and soon that will change. I have a long list of retirement goals, activities, and ideas. I have committed to giving myself at least a year (or maybe two) to try out retirement. It is different things to different people, and I want to find out who I am as a retired teacher before I grab a new identity as a something else.

Because my wife is a counselor, we did not discuss our retirement plans publically for a while. Our colleagues knew our plans. When another teacher told his students that he was retiring, kids who knew me began to put the pieces together, but I refused to confirm the rumors. Now I can tell the world!  

I am still working hard to make sure that my students learn the skills and content they need. I still want class to be fun, rewarding, and engaging for all of us. I am not becoming a different teacher or person because the end of my career is in sight, but my appreciation for the beauty of school, and of our school in particular, has been enhanced. I feel like I am having a many “It’s a Wonderful School” moments without an angel coming to guide me on the journey.

There is no doubt that I am going to miss school, my wonderful friends, and my fantastic students. There will be moments when I will long for the comfort and cycle of school. I want to boldly go into this new adventure. I will look back – a lot! It is my deep hope to stay in touch with the many people who made and continue to make my high school teaching career so rich and wonderful. That is one of the reasons I am a fervent fan of Facebook (and now Instagram). I love staying connected.

So now I will chronicle this new process. I will still be a Sunday school teacher. I will still be an educator, even if retired. And school will go on without me. How comforting and appropriate.

Your Behavior in High School Matters: The Past is Never Really Past

This week’s Supreme Court hearings are appropriately the subject of a great deal of discussion. They should be. The issues are weighty and important. One of the smaller lessons to take from this event is that what happens in high school does not stay in high school. What happens in college does not get forgotten.

Whether it is “boys will be boys” or “the best years of your life” or “you only live once” or any other rationalization for problematic choices – or worse – being young does not give you a free pass.

It should not.

I am not the person I was in high school or college, and I am happy about that. It is my strong belief that, as people age, they get better. However, that doesn’t mean that high schoolers’ decisions are without weight or should be casually excused.

Parents are concerned about academic behavior and place great importance on them. I have heard ad nauseam that a single B in a class could be a life sentence. Not getting into a college, earning a poor test score, or being closed out of a course are often viewed as life-altering.

There are many other choices that are life-altering. Sometimes, these choices are the means of discovering and creating our senses of self. Some choices reveal ourselves. This process of navigating decision-making is critical to the process of becoming adult. 

I have written about the car crash on October 13. While such events are many feel extreme, they are no more extreme than what happened to Dr. Ford. Attempts to minimize the power of teenage misbehavior may be an attempt to excuse or explain away its weight. This fails to recognize that, once we have some degree of independence, we must accept some degree of responsibility.

When I was in high school, very few people were carrying cameras all the time. Certainly, the photographic records of my classmate’s deeds and misdeeds were not posted publically. Social media makes this lesson all the more critical. What if Brett Kavanagh’s high school experience was chronicled by more than his calendar and yearbook?

I want my students to hear clearly: what you do today affects your future and the future of people around you, some of whom you may not even know. No one has a “get out of responsibility free card.” Or no one should.

I want my students to understand that the choices they make today, for better or for worse, will ride with (and within) them forever. What they choose to do about those choices, how they deal with them, confront them, or address them is a critical test of their maturity.

I want my students to be able to recognize problematic behavior in themselves and others and deal with it in a healthy way. When they make mistakes, I want them to learn to own those errors, and then recognize and repair what they have done to the fullest degree possible – and to work to make sure such things do not happen again to them or anyone else.

Teenage drug use, pregnancy, sexual assault, and other adolescent issues are not minor because those doing them are young. We often debate if individuals under eighteen should be “charged as adults.” When the crime is serious, we often argue that youthfulness does not save them from adult accountability. It certainly doesn’t save those whom they have hurt.

Hopefully, a small positive effect of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings is that it helps kids recognize their power and responsibility. I hope they hear the message the past is never really past. The choices we make  - and how we grow up and deal with them – become the substance of ourselves. 

My Daughter in Africa - Five Years Later

Groggily, I answered my cell phone from my bed. It was 6am on a Saturday morning and the ringing had abruptly awakened me. I knew who was calling. Only one person’s ringtone was set to be audible at all hours. It was my nineteen-year-old daughter calling from Nairobi, Kenya. It was not a scheduled call.

Her first words were, “Daddy, I’m fine.” I shook off sleep and snapped to clear thinking. She told me that there was a shooting at the big mall near her apartment, but she and her classmates were all safe. She had called early because she knew it would be all over the American media soon and she wanted to talk to her mother and me before we saw news reports.

That was five years ago today. I have written about what it was like to send her to Africa. When she finally got back, I wrote about being finally able to breathe again. Even as I reflected on her time in Africa and how we felt when we heard about the terrorist attack (it was far more than a shooting), my heart starts to race and I must blink back the tears. It was one of the most stressful and difficult times I have ever experienced; my child was in a foreign land where bad things were happening and I was helpless to assist her. All I could do was occasionally talk to her and wait.

As I reflect on this anniversary, two things come to mind: the easier and more straightforward is also the most obvious: our children must be able to take care of themselves. I knew my daughter was savvy and capable, but her skills were developed even further, and my faith in them was tested. While every instinct in me was telling me to fly to Africa, I could not do that, and I had to let my child take care of the situation.

We all grew from this experience. It was far more than an exercise in letting go, it was an empathy experience. This taught me how so many other family members feel when they cannot help their loved ones. Whether in a hospital, worrying about a child in the military, or watching someone fumble in horrible darkness, I got a small taste of the limits and pain of crisis parenting.

So I imagine the parents at the border, whose children have been taken from them, living in that crisis mode. My nineteen-year-old took care of me as the crisis began. She stayed in touch and reassured us, back home! These parents are separated from far younger children and most have no way to communicate with them at all.

Like my daughter, they are caught in a terrible political storm in a foreign place. Like me, they must wait and are powerless. While I am so grateful to the many individuals and organizations that are helping them, I feel helpless to help them.

And this makes me angry, furious!

Terrorists in Africa used my child’s well being as a political power play. She was not a player in their game, but merely a tool for achieving their ends.

And now, this administration and my country are similarly terrorizing children and their families for political gain. They have turned families into pawns of their power. My daughter was nineteen! These children are infants, toddlers, and far younger than my college student!

It takes my breath away. How could anyone use children in such a way?

They must not understand. They must not have had an experience of having a child lost or in jeopardy. This must be a failure of empathy, of compassion, of vision.

I was reunited with my child on December 24, a little more than two months after the attack on the Westgate Mall. I can feel that moment as if it was happening now.

When will the parents on the border hug their children again? When will they be reunited?

Now is not soon enough!

Finals Before Broken

After not enough debate, my school has decided to move final exams to the end of December, before the winter break. However, unlike many schools in our area, we are not altering the start or end of our school year. Instead, our semesters will be uneven. The second semester, starting in January, will be two weeks longer than first semester.

I am concerned that we have not fully explored the ramifications of this decision.

I fully endorse that school breaks should be homework free. They should be real breaks. That is clearly why so many members of our community supported this change. However, as I have written before if the problem is studying for finals over break, the answer is not to change the timing of finals, but the nature of finals. Finals are the issue, moving them doesn’t change the problem.

Nonetheless, here we are. We are going down this path and our map is incomplete. I have some concerns and questions about what will happen at the end of December.

Since the first semester will be two weeks shorter than in past years, students will have less time to master the content and become proficient in the skills. The end of the semester assessment will catch them earlier than it has in the past, meaning their grades may be lower.

In addition, the tests themselves may be different. I have already heard talk about changing the nature of first semester tests so that they are easier to grade. Teachers don’t want work over winter break either. While some areas already give a great deal of objective, multiple choice, and scantron based tests, we may see more of this. So, instead of a written exam allowing students to actively demonstrate their understanding, we may see more tests that are quicker and easier to grade, but more difficult for students.

Another option may be that we’ll see more finals due before the actual finals week. This has been happening more and more with our old calendar. This gives students more stress and work and teachers more time to grade. Currently, many students have final “projects” that must be turned in as early as two weeks before the scheduled exam date. I am willing to bet we’ll see many more of these.

Of course, with almost two additional weeks in second semester, we might see more content being taught after winter break. This might mean that second-semester finals are longer and include more material. Instead of an even split between semesters, first semester exams might be easier on teachers and harder on students and second-semester exams might just include more material.

The main reason for this shift was that teachers gave homework over break. Some students also used winter break as a time to get ready for finals and start studying. I have not seen this happen often. My experience is that students do very little or no work over the holiday. Finals used to be scheduled the third week of January, and I have not seen many students work on them before January. While I have seen students deal with homework over break, the solution is one that Lane Tech High School in Chicago recently implemented: make a rule that there is no homework over break!

If students are starting to study for tests over winter break, which used to begin four weeks before the start of the testing week, won’t they do this regardless of the calendar? Finals are now the third week of December. Four weeks before that is Thanksgiving! If students are stressed about finals and homework over winter break, that stress will now move to Thanksgiving, a shorter time off from school.

Finals are scheduled as three periods a day for three days. Each test is seventy-five minutes with a seventy-five-minute break between tests. Most students only come to school for one or two tests a day. The Friday is a day when students do not attend. I’ll bet that airline tickets to nice locations are cheaper if one leaves before the crowded winter break rush. They are probably even cheaper the earlier one leaves. What will we do with the students whose parents decide to pull them out of all or part of finals week to get out of town more quickly and less expensively? Will we have more students missing final exams with this calendar?

Is the rest of the world changing for finals? We will still have sports events, holidays, and everything that comes at the end of December. The school will move our events. We are moving one of the largest, our school charity drive to just before Thanksgiving! However, the outside world’s calendar will remain the same. For example, the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah will end exactly one week before finals.

So we may have lower grades, harder tests, stress over Thanksgiving, more absences (and thus even more stress) and the regular stressors that come with this time of year.

Can we talk about finals?

Take Your Senior English Teacher To College

As a Freshman English teacher, it was easy to know what students needed to be able to do to be prepared for Sophomore English since I taught that course! The same was true when I taught Junior English.

Senior English is a different animal: not all of my students are going to college. Some will not take a freshman composition class. Some will never write another literary analysis essay again.

So when alumni visit, I ask them, “What does your Senior English teacher need to know?” I ask how the reading and writing is going? I asked what surprised them and for what they felt prepared. I ask them to give me their top four things about college, and it is always nice when classes are on that list.

But this summer, as I think about my wonderful former-seniors heading off to college in the fall and those who preceded them, I have a different idea. What if I just rode along with you? How about taking your Senior English teacher to college?

And while I am eager to meet my new students, I would love to hang on to the old ones! Once I proposed that we reconstitute one of my Freshman English classes when the students became seniors. There was no way to do it. The kids and I loved the idea, but it was impossible – just like this one, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it.

I get quick glimpses of my former students in the summer. There are photos on social media, and conversations in town. I see them at the farmers market, coaching little league, counseling camp, or at other summer jobs. Summer is a mere preamble for them and I want to say, “Take me with you!”

I know I will feel the same way about the students who are about to enter my class in the fall, but right now, my mind is on those whom I may never see again. Wasn’t there some TV show where, when the main characters grew too old, the high school teachers just moved up to college with them? That seems so civilized and appropriate.

Here is the plan: we will all go to the same college together. How’s that?

I treasure the students who connect on social media, return for visits at breaks, or email to let me know that how they are doing and give me a peek into their post-high school lives.

I joke about the opposite as my students near graduation: how about flunking something senior year, I ask them, and then you can have one more year of high school? I tempt them with promises of favorite books, units or good grades, but we both know it is just my way of saying that I will miss you when you leave – and you’ll be far too engaged in your new world to think much about your former teacher in the old one.

That is the way it should be. It is the natural order that children grow up and move on. Yet, how many non-teachers have their co-workers move through their lives like that? I know, they aren’t my co-workers, but I spend as much time with my students as I do with my fellow teachers!

One of my former students sent me a beautiful email recently telling me that he had placed out of the Freshman English course at his university. He thanked me for my very small part in that. Knowing this young man, he will explore and read and learn in wonderful ways that I hope I get to see. I have faith that he will let me know about some of them.

So, in a sense, he has acknowledged that he is taking me to college. He is taking the skills he learned in our class to college in the fall. That is going to have to be enough.

The Price of Parking

In 1999, a parent of a Barrington High School student purchased a home next to the school. This parent had no intention of living in the house. The family already lived in the district. The only reason for this huge expenditure was to purchase the driveway. The parent had bought a parking spot for their child, a very expensive parking spot.

Setting aside the cost of the car, what does this choice mean? For most schools, including my own, there is either free or inexpensive bussing service available to anyone who lives more than a mile from the school. No child should HAVE to drive to school. Even those who live close form carpools.

What does it mean to spend thousands of dollars for a car and parking spot for a sixteen-year-old?

First, it means you are living well. This is an issue for affluent families.

Second, it says that convenience is important. Some parents don’t want the child to take another means to school. The bus is not a good choice for them. Why? What is wrong with carpools? They seem like a great way to share the cost. But financial cost is clearly not the key factor in these decisions.

We haven’t even thought about environmental considerations.

And what about safety?

Young drivers make mistakes. Young drivers are more likely to make mistakes when they are in a hurry. One hopes these errors are benign and easily repaired. Sometimes, young drivers are using devices or otherwise distracted. “Good” and “responsible” kids are still inexperienced drivers. Young drivers and teenagers in general need supervised practice. We must help them develop good habits.

If you were going to visit a high school and would be staying beyond the end of the class day, would you choose to park in the student lot or the faculty lot? Why? What about on a snowy day?

Having a group of inexperienced drivers in one place can be dangerous. The student lot at the high school is only one example. I live in a neighborhood that abuts our high school. Some of my neighbors allow students to park in their driveways. Many of these kids pay for that privilege. Of course, they are not charging Barrington prices, but again, between the cost of the car (and gas and upkeep) and the price of parking, this option is only available to families with means.

The high school allows most senior students to park for a fee in the student lot. Therefore, the parkers at my neighbors’ homes are most often younger, less experienced drivers. There are 152 homes in my subdivision. I don’t know how many kids are parking, but judging from the kids walking down my street after school, it must be more than twenty-five.

So, around 3:30, we have many young experienced drivers moving through our neighborhood. At just about the same time, the bus from the middle school drops off. Kids who are walking or biking are leaving the high school at that time, too. We are close enough to the elementary school that we do not qualify for free busing, so on nice days, we might also have younger students going home, as well.

A few years ago, a student of mine was riding his bicycle home. As he rode away from the school and down one of the streets in my neighborhood, a student driver who was “renting” a neighbor’s driveway pulled out a little faster than was safe. She cut off the cyclist and he hit her car. He was thrown over the car and landed on the street. When the EMTs arrived and treated him, they told him that, had he not been wearing a helmet, he might have had severe injuries  - or worse.

Most of the kids I see riding bikes to school are not wearing helmets.

I have been told by my lawyer friends that a homeowner would not be liable for actions of the student driver using their driveway. That doesn’t matter to me. If a child who was parking on my driveway hurt someone  - or worse – I would be very upset. I might not be legally liable, but I might see myself as at least partially responsible.

Kids make poor choices. Good and smart kids make mistakes. New drivers do dangerous things, not because they are foolhardy (although some are) but because they don’t know better.

There is no ignominy in taking the bus. Time with your child in the car (and their friends) is time to talk and get the news. It may be less convenient, but it is safer and healthier.

To my neighbors: please take these ideas into consideration if you are thinking about letting students park at your home. Please don’t sell out our safety. To parents: the way your child gets to school is more than a matter of convenience and affects more than just your child.

The Guns Are Going to Get Your Babies

It is time to face the facts:  those running the government do not care about our children or most of us.

We have had more school shootings than any other first world country and this administration has done nothing to stop them.

We have had more mass shootings in public places like offices, movie theaters, and concerts than any other first world country and this administration does nothing to stop them.

Their policy which allowed for the separating of children from their parents at our border is indicative of what they think about children in general.

Their policy which allowed for the separating of children from their parents at our border is indicative of what they think about children in general.

This administration shows no empathy for children separated from their parents. 

Their policy at the border shows that they are fine using children as hostages for political ends.

They are gutting public schools and the structures that support them.

They are undermining accessibility to college for all but the most wealthy.

Speaking of wealthy, the tax reform bill passed earlier this year was supposed to provide breaks for companies and wealthy individuals that would be shared (think trickled down) to average folks.

Have you seen any relief? Most companies have not shared this bounty with their employees. 

This administration has enacted trade tariffs with some of our most valued trading partners. These countries have reacted by increasing tariffs on incoming goods from the United States.

Once again, the American worker is hurt: the goods they produce will not be as able to be sold overseas, and the goods they purchase at home will cost more.

They are trying to reduce the benefits of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

So if you do not have private independently financed insurance, you and your family’s access to health care and retirement benefits are in jeopardy.

They are making friends with countries that have been problematic in the past and alienating our traditional friends.

Despite concerns about election tampering and nuclear weapons, this administration is reaching out to Russia and North Korea. How has this made us safer?

This administration has made it clear that it treasures its connection to White Nationalist, racist, and misogynistic groups and individuals.

This administration has defended individuals who have committed acts of hate, abuse, and assault. They have given these individuals key roles in the government.

This administration has defended hate groups and applauded their racist choices.

This administration has called people of color, women, and others animals and other derogatory terms.

To review:

·      You and your children’s safety is in jeopardy from a policy that does not protect the public from shootings.

·      Public education, the road to success for many of us, is under attack.

·      Taxes are lower only for the wealthiest.

·      Tariffs are hurting our jobs and our pocketbooks.

·      Access to insurance and retirement is being threatened.

·      Our leaders are fonder of people who have tried to hurt us than those who have helped us.

·      This administration is closely connected to racists, sexist, and others who have an extremist agenda.

We haven’t even talked about environmental and food safety, privacy on the internet, or several other issues that will make life less safe and more expensive for all of us!

None of this is “fake news.” None of this is even in dispute.

The shocking truth is that some of us are fine with this situation.

I am not.
Please vote.