RealityBypass

I’m a school teacher (soon to be a College Professor instead, I hope!). Stephen King once taught high school English and listed it as the job that sapped so much of his creativity he found it hard to write. I often see where he’s coming from. I spend my days dealing with 150 different teenagers, and their parents. (All at varied stages of sanity). It’s a demanding job, it’s a job of passion, and most certainly is a draining job. There really are days I want to go home and just let someone else on the tv screen tell me a story. (And then, of course, inevitably those danged story ideas keep popping into my mind, or I hear the Siren Call of the computer whispering my name).

Of course, teaching also gave King the inspiration for the novel Carrie. Funny how life works that way.  For me, what I’ve learned from teaching school is the amazing stories people of all ages have to tell.  The job has given me a daily glimpse into the home lives of many different families and individuals. I’ve learned from my students as much as I’ve taught them, and been inspired by them both for good and the bad.  Here’s a bit of what I’ve been exposed to:

• Students being shuffled between multiple step-families.
  • I particularly enjoyed the term “step-creatures” one used to refer to his step siblings. Maybe not nice, but definitely amusing and emotionally evocative.
• Beautiful loving parent-child relationships, and parents so demanding that they make the Dursleys look like the ideal family.
  • One in particular comes to mind, a parent who regularly told me the IQ of their child and insisted, in front of the child, that “John Doe isn’t very smart”.
• A student with deaf parents who taught me some sign language so I could communicate with them.
• Several students with preacher parents who have told me stories of:
  • Living in a church for a year, because the congregation was too poor to get them a house.
  • Visiting the Masai tribes in Africa and participating in their rites of initiation
  • Travelling down jungle rivers to preach the Lord’s word.
  • The lonelyness of having to share their father with 100 other families (or more).
• Students confronting issues of sexual harrasment, drugs and life choices.
• Students confronting the illness of parents.
• Students sharing their homes with foster children.
• Students discovering the Lord for the first time.
• The beauty of student creativity when you let them go wild creating movies and stories.
• The depth of poetry that you can find in a teenager’s soul
  • One of my students wrote a story about a three legged dog’s journey to heroism that made me cry.
  • Another writes beautiful stories of love and loss, merely in a few words when defining vocabulary words.
• The level of involvement and understanding many teenagers have of politics and world morality. (I chose my vote most recently based on listening to the kids debate, most of my adult friends knew jack and squat!)     

Anyway, I think there’s a sad tendency for adults to get stuck relating only to people of the same age group, and dismissing the reality that every person has a story. And that maybe, just maybe, someone younger than you can teach you someting. Or we forget, once we become an adult, that older people still have a lot to teach you. The moral of this post? Talk to people. Talk to lots of people. Talk to people of 8 years to people of 80 years. My friends are of all ages and walks of life. I don’t always agree with them. The kids sometimes make me nuts, but I always learn from them. And there’s always stories…