English 9 Reflections
Freshmen, being away from school this past month and being overseas has been a nice respite, but I find that it’s been difficult to get back to writing, at least these final thoughts, about our year together that I said I would offer. Not knowing whether I’d be back for the next school year or not, making difficult decisions about my family’s future, dismantling and packing my room, and the (happy) exhaustion of herding teenagers through Europe, was taxing, but I’m back and fairly rested.
I don’t really have much different to offer you than I did your freshmen peers at the end of last year, but I’ve been thinking about my experience traveling with other students and teachers from other parts of the country with whom we shared buses from France to Greece and I observed some things that I think are worth sharing with you.
Over three weeks I and some of your Dorado peers traveled with three groups of students and teachers from London to Athens: a group from Louisiana, another from Nebraska, and the other from Kansas. You know that I don’t allow students to imbibe alcohol or drugs or engage in sexual activity when they travel with me for very important reasons, the consequence being any student caught engaging in such activity is returned home on the next available flight. Well, the other teachers I traveled with didn’t share my prohibitions and they were willing to let their students engage in almost any of the aforementioned activities with impunity.
In any given evening we’d see students, some as young as yourselves, two-fisting beers, sucking down wine and hard liquor, and smoking cigarettes in front of, and thus with the tacit approval of their adult chaperones. The following mornings, we’d witness those same students woozy and sick from their previous evenings’ adventures, puking and holding up the rest of us, walking around with hurt feelings as a result of their loosened inhibitions and inability to handle the twin tasks of moderating their substance intake and tempering idiocy output of inappropriate words and thoughts to their friends in tour. Many had little experience and, because of awful adult supervision, had no moral guidance.
What was the bad in it, a few kids partying a little too hard? One mid-west girl wound up with a broken leg in Italy; the student-travelers (no Dorados) almost destroyed our cruise ship with fire; the entire traveling group (including Dorados) was exposed to swine flu because some of the mid-west kids got a little too cozy with some travelers in a different group from Texas; plenty of kids from the other groups missed fantastic opportunities to see and enjoy our cultural heritage (and threatened our own experience) because they were too hung over and, in missing so much, simply wasted their parents’ investment on the tour; they exposed their lack of character and integrity and, in doing the latter, revealed the failures of their parents and teachers to set behavioral limits and caring expectations. It also made shamefully public the parents’ and teachers’ lack of concern and love they had for them.
This was the limit of the other groups’ imaginations: they went to Europe to drink and have sex. They often said as much—on the bus, when they didn’t think any adult was listening, they were overheard to say “F- this (fill-in the landmark we were visiting), I just wanna get drunk and hook-up”.
What’s the moral of this story? I’d encourage you to think beyond the limits of your imaginations; that is, go beyond the conventions of the institutions of school and public education and exceed the expectations the general public has of students in the American school system. Those of you that didn’t do as well as you hoped this year in English 9, I’d urge you to look past your self- or circumstantially-imposed limits to see the potential of your own faculties and then use them to your best advantage; and those that did perform as they’d hoped or even better, I’d insist that you continue to work smart and hard to fulfill your immediate and long-term goals.
I could go on and on about what I’ve said in class many times about your responsibilities about your own success and failure, but I won’t. I’ll save that for my next group of freshmen. Instead, I’ll write that I hope each and every one of you has a fun and restful but productive summer (at least as much as those who’re attending summer school can), and I’ll look forward to seeing you in the fall (yes, I will be back, but more on that later). I hope you’ll drop by T-12 and tell how you’re doing. Until then, best hopes for you success.