WRITTEN BY EMILY MORRISON
The sound of fingertips quietly tapping keyboards is a tonic to my weary soul. As an English teacher, there’s simply nothing more soothing than sitting in a room full of reluctantly typing teens.
Though it’ll be nearly summer by the time you read this, dear readers, today is one of those dreary, rainy days in spring where life is a hodgepodge. A quarter of the school is on a field trip, another quarter is SAT testing, and everything feels helter-skelter on days like these.
It’s “all hands on deck,” and honestly, the deck feels kinda depressing this morning.
As I look out at young faces staring at screens, flipping pages and scrolling on phones, talking to the kid beside them when they don’t think I’m looking, I wonder how they’ve aged so much in one year.
Last year, when they were only juniors in my English class, they still had the pimply acne of youth, the spastic attention span of fruit flies, and the slept-on bedhead hair that so often accompanies 17-year-olds.
But that’s not what I see now.
I see girls in cute braids and boys in baseball caps. I see hair dyed red and blond and a girl in skull-covered fishnets paired with combat boots. They look like they’re finding themselves, or trying to anyway, while they write, write, write and read, read, read.
Wouldn’t it be great if all these books and essays would read and write themselves? Then they could get on with this business of growing up without the drag of learning.
If only I could describe to you the joy, the laziness, the bold look in their eyes that says, “Hey, I’m just waiting on the bell, and then I’m outta here, lady. Got people to see and places to go, and it’s all BIGGER and BETTER than this.”
That’s the beauty of kids. They intrinsically believe it all gets better — that life, with all its promise, is right around the corner from period three on a drizzly Thursday morning.
I want to interrupt their typing and tell them, “You’re right, of course. It does all get better and worse, and it will be everything and nothing in between.
“Because that’s the grand paradox of life, children. It will never really make sense unless you keep trying to make it make sense, and even then it will be a struggle.
“But if I’m making it make sense, then you can, too.”
And doesn’t that all sound so inspirational and poetic and trite?
At 18, who wants to hear that life is good, bad and ugly, and that they’ll have to really work for the things they want?
“Yeah, hard pass,” the kids would say. “Skip the lecture, teacher-friend, because we’re all stocked up on people telling us what life’s all about.”
I bet I felt that way, too, when some well-meaning adult three decades older tried to have a conversation with me about my future.
Maybe I said what they wanted to hear, “Oh, yeah, I bet life’s hard,” or perhaps I acted like I knew everything already. Life’s funny.
You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it. And I know now how little I knew then.
I know now that sitting in a room full of angsty, hormonal teenagers and telling them I need a snack feeds my soul.
I know talking to them every day and helping them figure out how to be the best version of themselves makes me feel like the best version of myself.
I know being kind, smiling, and listening when I’d rather be lecturing helps me remember I don’t know everything. Every child has a story to tell, and their stories teach me new lessons every day.
Mostly, I know I’ll never be as young as I once was, and that’s OK. There’s a lot of clarity that comes with growing older, and I feel so fortunate to do just that, to keep growing.
Also, I need to buy some skulk-covered fishnets and combat boots. Those are too cool for school.
