They're Ba...ack

Examiner column for November 28.   

     They begin to return in October. Their hair is shorter, or longer, and they wear different clothes.  They look familiar, but strangely different.

    They are returning graduates of high school, walking the halls in search of former teachers, former classrooms, former teammates, and possibly in search of the ghosts of their former selves.

    Sometimes they are the class stars with 4.0 GPA’s and the lead in the spring musical. But more often than not, they are the disaffected ones who liked your class okay, but hated school in general, and forgot to turn in assignments. Or slept through class. Or even stayed home on test days.

    Liz the straight-A student visited, but so did the other Liz, who nearly failed my class one quarter when she didn’t turn in her project. Yet one year later it was hard to see who had been the high achiever, who had struggled. They were both smiling, poised young women---focused on college and their newfound independence.

    They were a reminder to me that high school does not provide “the best years of your life” to adolescents. Even the best high school is a miserable place where cliques make or break self-esteem, where administrators check for cell phone use and midriff exposure, and where sleep-deprived students move through the day pretending everything’s fine.

    It’s also where all teachers think their class is the most important one in the school, and can’t understand why students should want to sleep, pass notes, or daydream during their riveting lessons.

    In other words, high school is a world of make believe where students pretend to care about their schooling and teachers pretend not to notice that students are only pretending.

    It takes only a few months of college for all that pretense to fall away, and then---miraculously---students often find themselves interested in what they’re studying. And so they return, measuring their newly acquired wisdom against their former selves.

    This happened to Jason. He was so bright that any grade less than an A was a deliberate act. He would begin an essay brilliantly, and then just bag it. “I got bored,” he’d confess. He called my class a “waste of time.”

    Then he enrolled in a Modern Fiction course at William and Mary College, and began emailing his thoughts about the reading. Suddenly he was interested in Virginia Woolf and James Joyce; why hadn’t I seen that spark in my classroom? How is it possible I hadn’t ignited the flame that burned so brightly in his emails only a few months later?

    The answer is, of course, that the spark was there all along. Away from the stultifying atmosphere of high school, students feel free to pursue their interests, to appear “geeky” or “alternative” or any number of assorted labels they feared in high school. Jason liked James Joyce in my class; he just wasn’t letting on.

    Returning to high school is a boost to graduates, because they see how insignificant all their fears were. And it’s a boost to teachers because they realize that the pretense of interest their students display may not be pretense after all.

 

 

Comments

[Liz]

It was so good to see you!! You are very right about high school- i told one class, "if you don't fit in high school, go to college, because everyone fits in at college."
Maybe I'll come back again when I am on intersession in January-legally, of course...
(I emailed this to my dad, and he said, "which Liz are you?")
Always,
Liz

PS- you should link your son's blog from your site. Just a thought.

[Dr. Jacobs]

Liz----it was great to see you as well. And I've linked my son's site!

[Muzzy]

I must agree with you. High school really is its own little world. Seperated from reality we are housed in this isolated "utopia" for four years as we are prepared for what is to come. Thinking about it this way makes it seem almost inhumane. But then theres always the fact that Oakton High School shares some disturbing similirities to a jail. Like how sassy and class xp run the same programming that they use to keep track of inmates in jails. Or how we have prison guards, aka administrators. And how you're not allowed to leave jail, I mean school, without valid permission. It really is unlike any other educational experience one can possibly recieve. You make a good point about how returning students all return moderately happy. It is true they probably return because of those few good memories from the past, but then who can spend four years in a building and not develop some type of bond? Braind washing? lets not go there. Well anyways I just wanted to say that i realy liked this post. High school students really are like zombies, half asleep, feet shuffling as we stumble our way into first period at 715 in the morning after a 30 minute drive through traffic on 66.

[David Jacobs]

Thank you for the link! I will keep your original comment about my weblog as a testimonial: "My son's blog is a little political and techie, but it is rather stunning in its construction." :)

[Pat]

I gotta say... Dr J got Oakton's number. Lots of classes in college are just interesting and it motivates me to go to class, rather than forcing me to be there. I thoroughly enjoy my theology class but I'm sure that my teacher could care less if I were to come. Therefor the class is more interesting as only people who want to be there and are interested show up.

[Dr. Jacobs]

There is no greater compliment than the comments of TWO graduates on this column. I will always love you, Liz and Pat!

[chris]

Today's Washington Post listed the largest schools in the region and the nation. Robinson is #25 in the nation at 4000+. Oakton is just off the bottom of the region list at 2600. In a second article, Diane Ravitch, education historian at New York University, noted that supersize schools may have outlived their value - the smorgasbord approach to education has not proved especially successful. I wonder if the creation of oversize schools has not led to the isolated utopia you mentioned. Everything within four walls means there is no need to experience the real world (I betray my empiricist leanings).

[Trent]

The biggest thing that high school students worry about is acceptance, and they'll find acceptance wherever they can get it. There are a lot of kids out there who are interested in something but are afraid to be "too" interested, simply because of the social issues you describe.

My wife, a high school chemistry teacher, was able to successfully start a chemistry club at her school. The students in the group are passionate about chemistry and were able to make many new friendships through the group; in fact, many of them are more or less in their own clique now, sharing interests far beyond chemistry.

Have you considered starting an independent student reading/literature group? This could provide the opportunity for students with that fundamental spark to not only explore that spark, but find other students with common interests.

[David]

Hi Trent,

http://mentormatters.blogspot.com/2005/03/book-club-bonus.html
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/03/25/columns/erica_jacobs/93columns24jacobs.txt

There are a couple links about Dr. Jacobs' book club, although it's on school grounds, it is extracurricular.

David

[Erica Jacobs]

As for the literature group, there are student reading groups of several varieties in the school, and many other extracurricular opportunities that provide students with a sense of belonging. But, despite those groups, I still think the nature of the place and the endemic peer pressure create a sense of alienation for nearly all students. And it's often even worse in smaller schools. I wish I had the answer, but reading George Orwell and others about schools early in the 20th century leads me to believe the high school culture hasn't changed much over time. Perhaps it's what has to happen at that stage of adolescent development!

[Elaine]

Dr. Jacobs -
I really liked this little post about students returning from college - not only because it is mostly true but becasue i just like how its cleverly written. I like how you called high school a world of make believe because in a sense, its true. There are the students who do care but there are are even fewer who genuinely have a passion for what theyre learning. I hope to develop those passions more next year in college; these hallways of oakton can be so stifling sometimes. I'm also comforted by your acknowledgement of our school's similarity to a prison.. (at least that's the image i got from it). See you in class!

[Mika]

Dr. Jacobs--Hello! I enjoyed reading your post on returning students. It took me back to a few years ago, when I still regularly visited with some friends of mine. They and their parents have moved from the NoVa area (and my work schedule is just crazy these days!) so I haven't gone back in a while, but the visits were always interesting. You had already (been) transferred to Oakton, so I couldn't stop by your classroom on any of my visits.

It's been interesting for me to learn, from those visits and from high school and college reunions, is how many assumptions I made back then about people and where they'd wind up or what they'd end up doing based on what they were doing or wanted to do at the time. I had so many preconceived notions! (prejudices?)

And I agree that high school can be pretty miserable at times. I remember thinking at times that the only thing worse than it was the social crucible known as middle school. Thank god that I'll never have to repeat those 2 years of my life!!! But I also have some great memories from high school and had a lot of fun and enjoyed (some) of my classes.

Now, as residents of a large city, my husband and I are faced with the dilemma of what to do when we have children and they reach school age. Most families around us move to the suburbs or send their children to private school. I never realized how different school systems could be until I came to here, where some of the schools (even elementary schools) have police or staff at the doors with metal detectors, where some schools don't have functioning libraries, where some schools have very few computers, and so on. My husband assumes that any private school will be better than the public schools, but that's hard for me to wrap my mind around, since I was fortunate to attend public school in an area where the private schools weren't necessarily better. I definitely wasn't thinking about this much in high school.

Anyhow, I majored in English lit. in college (minored in French) and am now a managing editor at an independent academic publisher (http://www.brookespublishing.com). I love editing and I love working with editors. Just this week, we had our holiday luncheon at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, and we were all grousing that the possessive in Ruth's really bothered us (a Chris Steakhouse that belongs to Ruth?). The one shocking thing about college was that although I was an English lit. major, I never once took a college-level course in Shakespeare! (I took the Chaucer seminar instead of the Shakespeare or Renaissance lit seminars.) It's my dirty little secret from college....

Anyhow, I really like your blog and the sleek look of all of the TypePad blogs that I've looked at, so I'm thinking of starting one of my own....

Cheers,
Mika (from your Humanities class from 1991 or 1992 or so...)

[Dr. Jacobs]

Hi Mika,
Thanks so much for your comment and for catching me up on your whereabouts. It's hard to believe that a petite junior could now be all grown, an editor, with a family of your own! I loved that class with Mr. Lindo, and I'm glad you remember it. When your kids are ready for school, visit and look carefully at the expressions on the students' faces. If they're happy and feel free, that's the place for your children!