Mini-Me

Anyone who has spent time amongst teenagers knows it takes a great deal of compassion and patience to work with these individuals. When I decided to get my teaching certificate I wasn't certain I had the compassion and patience. It isn't that I'm not a compassionate person, but it isn't in my nature to be outwardly so and I fully anticipated this to be a problem in my teaching career. Imagine my surprise when it wasn't a problem.

I have often said that having children is seeing your faults magnified and personified. Your children seem to mimic your worst features and play them back for you when they are young and I've watched my sister's children do this very thing to her. It makes me laugh and makes me shudder as I wonder what my own children will be like. My niece and nephew are still very young though and there is a seriousness to my pondering as I watch them grow older.

I have taught over one thousand students. That's one thousand teenagers with one thousand different personalities and well over ten thousand different issues and struggles. We teachers have a saying "meet the parent and you'll forgive the student" and it's the truth. So often our worst students have the most awful home life and it's not even the way you'd think. The children who are suffering from abuse and/or neglect are easy to spot. It's the children who are getting pressure at home to be perfect, the children whose parents try to be their friend rather than their parent, the children whose mother is sleeping with half the men in town that are the frightening ones. The actions of their parents manifest themselves in the strangest of ways and often it's not obvious. We literally must meet the parent to understand why the child is acting the way they are. It is then when the question becomes "can we teach them to rise above this influence?"

As our society has changed, the job of teaching has changed as well. It used to be that the community and the parents raised the children. Now, community means little as no one can really trust their neighbor and clubs and organizations that once were overrun with children now have difficulties pulling kids away from their video games, ipods and myspace pages. Our children have very few role models to choose from when they decide to model their behavior. As teachers, we've had to begin by starting to show them who and what they can be, give them the positive reinforcement they crave and the order and discipline they also crave. It may be hard to believe, a teenager desperately seeking order and discipline, but they do crave it. We teach them how to rise above their challenges, how to be good citizens, respect those who respect them and to somehow find out who they are in this crazy world. What bothers me is that parents have come to expect us to teach their children these lessons. I met with several parents today and with each set of parents I found a new and profound respect for their child. No wonder student A is struggling when her mother is so quick to agree that she's not smart enough to do well in science. No wonder student B has a lack of respect for me when his mother admits to me that she is often gone for days at a time because of her new boyfriend... won't I too just invest a bit of time in him and then be out of his life at the end of the school year?

Each year I begin by calling them my students and sometime during the school year I begin calling them my kids. I don't know when it happens and it's not a conscious decision. I wouldn't trade a single day of working with these teenagers, they are precious and have so much potential. It does however, frighten me when I think of having children of my own. What faults and insecurities will I give to my own children and will I recognize them as they manifest? Will I be one of these parents who expects something out of my child they are not capable of producing or will I expect too little of them? Will I, like so many other working moms out there forget to teach my own children how to be a good person? Or, through the gifts of this job I somehow chose to do, will I be able to have the presence of mind to raise them and nurture them as they will truly deserve?

I guess only time will tell.