"That must be dreadful," people frequently comment when they hear that I teach junior high students. The response dismays me. Are children like puppies? Should we only like them until cute becomes awkward and vulnerability becomes anxiety and apathy? Over the years, I've learned that everyone has a specialty. Mine is not a room full of six year olds. Perhaps when people dismiss the desirability of my student population, they are thinking about two things: their own junior high experience, and parenting a greasy, erupting and always moving target.
A lot of people my age grew up during the era of the latch-key child. We mostly raised ourselves and we were left to wander the aisles of angst in the K-Mart of adolescence, alone with our hair and our loneliness, both piqued beyond repair. It was every bit as harsh as it is today for kids who struggle with divorce, abuse, mean girls, violence, broken hearts and a newer and longer chapter of poverty than anything the eighties could have conceived. We are of the Breakfast Club and Fight Club, of Heathers and the Weather Channel and, sigh, we wouldn't go back to junior high for all the money...even in these times when the money would be handy to pay off our copious debt.
Parenting a thirteen year old is not anything like teaching one. This post isn't about the pain and fear involved with parenting, so I won't even try to describe it. There is joy too, of course. Peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys. To be a parent is to know extravagant vulnerability.
What is beautiful about awkward? Baby fat pooching out a tummy and still wearing a clingy shirt. Wearing high heels that are too high and tripping down the hallway. The courage of pink hair. Or french braids that don't quite work. An older brother's much-too-large sweats and slippers on a waifer-thin body, bending in sweat-soaked, wrinkled-faced concentration over a desk peppered with fractions. Asking your mother how to kiss a girl after being kicked off the computer for looking at porn. Swearing and enjoying the pure sparkle of the words. The honesty to cry in front of peers and get fired up enough to shout out loud. Talking out loud in class about visiting your dad in jail. (It is what it is.) Being told in the morning that your parents are getting divorced and showing up for school like it's any other day. Asking the teacher in your new school if you can resume counseling because some of the conversations you've heard lately are bringing back memories of your own rape. Anticipating the haunted house on facebook. Decorating each other's lockers with crepe paper and bows on birthdays. Helping the kitchen lady clean up the tables without being asked. Kissing under the bleachers.
To be a teacher is to love the kid enough to envision the small child and potential hero within, but to have the emotional distance to see the long view--and to see it actualize over and over so many times that one grows to trust the pattern, to believe in the long view. It is to know that the broken hearts do lead to a deeper understanding of love, and they are necessary and purposeful and such a meaningful part of what it means to be human. It is to truly understand that mean girls are mean because nice girls were mean to them. It is to eventually realize that the kids we wring our hands over the most frequently become the strongest. They become the ones we use as examples of those who conquer suffering, or who will best understand another group of the abused and misused. There is not good in all suffering, but young people have taught me not to wring my hands so much as to celebrate their resilience and strength. They have taught me to recognize what was strong about me during that time I felt most ugly--or the times I still do. I have learned to see them all as works-in-progress; it is not hard. In doing so and for so long, it has allowed me to see it in myself. I have come to see myself not as a final draft with all my errors, but as a work-in-progress, still crafting myself, still being crafted. That has been the greatest lesson of all.
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