Jim Burke: The English Teacher's Companion

Senior Moments: Permission

As I watch the seniors in my class and at home, the young seniors and the elders, and consider my own place on that continuum, one word comes to mind again and again: permission. 

We cannot reach or teach those in our care, whether older or much younger, if they will not give us permission to say or do anything; nor can they get where they want to go, become what they want to be, if they do not find a way to give themselves permission to listen to us, but also to themselves.

Permission is subtle, often not even spoken; yet you can tell when someone gives it. They yield, they listen a bit more, look a bit longer.

All the more difficult, however, that those we care about most--our own children--often withdraw that permission, revoke our library card, telling us that they are now closed for a time and not interested in checking out the wisdom we have spent our lives gathering to give to them.

During such times, these young seniors move into a new season, a winter where they must often wander alone through the long white days they have given themselves permission to endure. 

Under such circumstances, we must give them permission to do this; we must also give ourselves permission to look on, often while they suffer in some way we find difficult to watch. It is during such seasons, however, that they are making themselves. 

Remember when our children were young, entering into those periods between one stage and the next, when they slept longer and later? And the doctor would say that during that sleep they were growing, preparing themselves for the self they would wake to, the one that was a little less ours and a bit more their own? And if we tried to help, to do things we once did for them, they would say with that huffy voice, "I'll do it myself!"

So it is with the young senior who is trying on that early adult self, the one that doesn't fit them so well yet, but into which they will grow. So it is with the elderly senior who must, after a lifetime of doing for others, permit those people to now do things for them, permit themselves to be cared for, provided for, as they move into their own next season.

And those of us in the middle, who shuffle between caring for parents in the morning and kids in the evening, as we all grow older together? We must give ourselves permission to look for and listen to those who know the territory ahead, whose voices can assure us we will make it through to the other side of this season where the days fall like leaves too many to catch. We must give ourselves permission to still listen to ourselves and to live out all those stories we have told but not yet lived.

Senior Moments: The Work of Men

During my senior/18th year growing up in Sacramento, I pumped gas, washed cars, parked cars, waxed and rented skis, photographed properties for my uncle's real estate business and girls at my high school who needed photos for their modeling portfolios, and, as mentioned in a recent blog, collated-folded-sorted-stuffed papers in the bindery at a printing plant. (I should note that at 18 I assumed I was going to be a professional photographer....)

My son Whitman has no job but sells things through eBay and other venues, demonstrating a sometimes shockingly modern entrepreneurial ability to buy, trade, sell---and earn. On a good day, he makes more with a few keystrokes than I ever earned in an eight-hour day. It somehow represents the changing nature of work. When I ask him about all this, he grins and takes an almost paternal tone of patience while trying to exlpain the modern world of digital commerce to me.

But an article in today's San Francisco Chronicle about men and work in America today really shocked me as it described the trends in the workplace in general and with men in particular. 

The article paints a portrait of a world  that could not be more different than the world my father stepped into at 18, taking a job at a place (the Office of State Printing) where he would work for the next 38 years until he retired (early due to cancer). And shockingly different than the world my father-in-law Melvin occupied at 18 as he prepared to ship out to China during World War Two (his brothers going to Omaha Beach and the Alusian Islands).

I want to say I am worried about the young men I teach, and I suppose I am; but I also find them all good young men who seem not to turn away from work. What I do know is that the world is not waiting with open arms and easy jobs as it was for me, my father, or my father-in-law when they were the same age.

It was, of course, a different world then. Now we must help our sons and students learn to live in this world, a world where women and my female students appear to be much more at home and willing to do what they must to make a living so that when the work day's done they can then make a life.

Senior Moments: What Do Seniors Want?

An article in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Millennial Generation (which includes current high school seniors) would rather have a cell phone than a car. 

When I was a senior in 1979, I wanted a car the way today's kids apparently want a cell phone. 

Then I thought about Ann, who would have been 18 in 1941, just as the war getting under way, her brother about to head off to fight in the European theater, her future husband eventually going to the Far East to fight there, and the boys all around her in high school leaving daily to join the war effort. She and all those around her would simply have wanted their family, friends, and fellow Americans to return home as soon as possible and all in one piece.

Senior Moments: Where the Past, Present, and Future Meet

Friday night and most of Saturday morning, I read the essays my seniors wrote on the theme of separate worlds. Yet all weekend I could only think how impossibly connected these worlds we live in and move through are.

This morning Ann sat in a chair at a bend in the Russian River where as a girl our daughter's age (12), Ann herself fished and rowed down the river. This morning Whitman, fishing the same stretch of water, sat in the shade of a bridge that carries us over to the side of town where Ann's childhood past lives in memory and mind. 

Those are the moments she remembers most vividly and cherishes: fishing, boating, playing at the river, camping with family. These are the moments she recalled over dinner last night in Jenner where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean. 

Those are the moments we are trying to give our own children with a greater urgency as this senior year begins for Whitman, at the end of which he will pass from this life with us to the next one he will create for himself.

Thinking of the past as I listened to Ann speak of it there beside the river this morning, I could not help but recall Faulker's remark that "the past is not dead; it is not even past." 

Senior Moments: Separate Worlds

The summer reading assignment for one of my senior classes (AP Lit) was to find two books that somehow explored the idea of separate worlds. 

This turned out to be a much better assignment than I even realized as seniors are, by virtue of their status, living on or moving toward the border between one world and the next.

So it is with elders, one world (of family, work, comfort, security, and more) giving way to another world where one comes to live more and more; for many, though, including Ann, they move back and forth across those worlds. Thus what often appear to be totally separate worlds are, in most cases, much more integrated, something like the image at the top.

This process, of moving from one world into the next, is almost a law of physics when it comes to high school seniors: they are supposed to grow tired of and even resent school, home, family, and sometimes friends. It requires a lot of steam to get oneself up and out of the world of the familiar and into the world of the future you must begine to create responsibility for yourself. 

To get students to think about this idea of separate worlds, to goad them beyond the obvious thinking of either/or, I gave them images like the one above and the painting below by Edward Hopper. Art bring together so many forces; it needs a bigger place in the curriculum. 

Artists and writers, such as Jonathan Franzen in his book Freedom, which I just finished yesterday, remind us through their depiction of us lost in our separate worlds just how connected our worlds are. One might go so far as to say that the more separate we imagine our worlds to be the more obvious it is how similar we all are.

Today, the kids came in, having spent the last couple periods developing their ideas about this theme through spirited, intelligent discussions, and spent the period writing the year's first essay. Judging by a quick scan of the papers, they did the sort of thinking and writing (about their reading) that we hope to see all our kids doing as they prepare to leave the world of high school for that other, seemingly separate world of the real world.

 

 

Note: I entirely understand if you decide to unsubscribe from the blog this year as I post nearly every day. If you do, stop back by now and then to see what's up and check in; then come back next summer when this year's "Senior Moments" thread has concluded.