A couple of weeks ago, I watched a reel from “Toby-the-Neuro-Scientist” about maybe not quite failing his A-levels. He failed to achieve a score that would get him into the University program he wanted. So he worked for a year waiting table and pissed that away on clothes and drinking, but got serious about maths and got into uni, but his first year was “rubbish,” and then tried to be better the second year and was hit by a car. His third year was Covid so he graduated “alone in [his] bedroom.” He took a year off waiting table again and entered a dementia program to graduate the top of his class, researched Parkinson’s disease for two years. Ten years after those disastrous A-levels, he has his PhD from a prestigious university. Who woulda thunk it?

In four years, who might you become? In ten?

I don’t believe people can do whatever they put their minds to. I would never have played in the NBA, no matter how much I wanted that. But I’ve done a lot of things I never expected to consider doing when I was 17 and newly out of high school. I’ve drawn plans for houses and judged field trials for sighthounds, written books and taught both art and English, advised yearbook, written books, and run a half marathon. Only the design and artwork were on my radar. What did I know about my own future?

When I began teaching in 1976, they were already saying that most people would change careers every four years. I wasn’t sure that was true. I still tend to doubt it. What I know for sure is that I taught high school and college students in private and public schools for forty years, and my students surprised me again and again with what they chose to do and what didn’t do, the ones who set aside the “obvious” for the sake of something they hadn’t seen coming. I like to think I helped them to surprise themselves.

They will themselves routinely underestimate their abilities; their capacity for growth, their power and will is surely beyond their youthful imagination.

We had two brilliant choirmasters at the school where I taught for 25 years. The first hire might have been pure luck, the second was because admin was smart enough to allow the first to find her. What those two people could demand from their singers was astonishing and inspiring to their students. It inspired me.

I broke down our goals—this is what we are going to do—I showed them—and then step by step, we got there. They couldn’t imagine, and then they did after all! Students who had never handed in a one-page paper, hadn’t written a clear sentence since 5th grade, left my room with essays and stories several pages long. They thought they didn’t like poetry and discovered some they liked and wrote poems they were proud of. They compiled written projects with too many pages to staple—they needed a hole-punch and a folder. They made things they didn’t know they could do and did it beautifully and with intelligence and heart and humor.

The work of any teacher is to open doors, windows, and tiny cracks in what might otherwise appear to be a solid wall of No. They need to rediscover faith and trust. They are young and they should be able to trust you not to underestimate them, because so many will underestimate themselves. The ones too sure might need to learn humility, but most need more than that. They need an opening, a light shining on the terrifying plain of possibility.

In EdPsych, I learned that Fifth Grade is when children begin to hesitate. Until them, as an art teacher, I could offer anything and they would try. Here, let’s make butterflies! Let’s make masks! Let’s fly around the world! In Fifth Grade they learned embarrassment and failure; they feared they couldn’t manage the assignment. I saw some of that while working in schools as a university student.

After teaching Art for three years, and before teaching college English and Writing, I taught at a 4-year high school, mostly Junior English for 25 years, and discovered a second shift in confidence. They came in as kids in their first year as freshmen and I usually had two 9th graders in my Yearbook class. Maybe those fresh kids cared about grades, maybe only sport, maybe Scouting or their part-time job and money. Maybe they were curious; maybe they only wanted to get through the day. School was a place with other students, older and wiser students, and graduation requirements they mostly ignored at first. By their Junior year, my students abruptly recognized that they would be leaving high school for something else. Soon.

The goals of their classmates were not their goals. The religion of the smartest dent in her class forbade her going to college; by the end of that year she was a wreck. College meant time away from a mentally fragile parent, and that obligation of care was sacred. Parents expected a sports scholarship and they were worn out from sideline parent coaching. They were not “on track” to graduate with their class. Like the neuroscientist above, everything that could go wrong stood between them and every goal.

Senior year was the end of what had been their life to that point. Sure, there was life outside school. They had families or maybe they didn’t. Some remembered pre-school and most had worked part time or even full time in the summers. Beyond that, most had spent the largest chunk of their time awake being educated by teachers. For twelve years or so, the structure of their lives was set by k12 public schools. That was about to change, and most of them recognized this when they were 17 years old and it hit them like a brick in the head.

I attended a 3-year high school. I thought I would be an architect going in and I was advised against that more times than I can count. I have an aptitude for a career in architecture, and I would eventually draw for an architect and also design and draw remodels and houses. But I began college as an artist, a visual artist. I retired as a college teacher of writing. I did a great many things in-between.

Did I change jobs/careers every four years as was predicted? To be honest, it’s probably averaged out to about that: making tacos, selling records, delivering direct [junk] mail, teaching Art, judging field trials, serving on nonprofit boards, breeding dogs, selling at a bakery, making pastries, mothering sons, designing remodels, designing interiors, drawing for an architect, teaching English, coaching cross-country, teaching college writing, editing the writing of others, writing essays and poems and stories, publishing a novel. That’s how many in the 56 years since senior year? Do the math. Some work was part-time, some tasks were simultaneous, some were mostly hobbies and some were professions, several earned me nothing in money and some were only about the money.

Would anyone have pegged all those jobs and tasks and careers would fill up my time and life when I graduated high school in 1970? I certainly wouldn’t have.

We surprise ourselves. Our lives rarely follow a predictable pattern anymore. Maybe that is wonderful, because sometimes it is. As teachers, we are not there to make their way, that’s their job. Our job is to get them looking past the immediate barriers. Best to prepare them for wonder.

---

Maybe coming in 2027 from &PRIDE Press, a detailed manual for teachers:

HOW TO TEACH WRITING WITHOUT MAKING YOUR EYES BLEED

Setting goals, assigning and grading papers, and doing it without killing off the rest of your life.