Thoughts on being a High School Teacher…The Virgin Suicides, and being in high school again!

My profession is like being in purgatory, and my soul has not yet been released to that other after-life—where I can finally be complacent. The kids don’t treat me badly, and the lesson planning and grading (which can occasionally be tedious) is not that bad, but what really gets me is that I am forced to relive those years of angst, recklessness, and yearning day in and day out. I see it on my students’ faces, I read it in their writing, and I hear it from them.

Upper-middle class kids especially. What is going on with this population? Do they talk about working harder than they do? Is life more difficult for them than it seems to warrant? Are they equipped for failure? If they are not equipped for failure, is this why so many of my students seem so depressed? They are supposed to achieve, to make good on their parents’ $20,000 a year investment, but they are not allowed to fail, and if they fail, they are not just making a mistake, are they are failures in life? This is how many of my students act.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ book, and Sophia Coppola’s film, The Virgin Suicides is a masterpiece in understanding oppressed, fearful, disenchanted upper-middle class kids. Kathleen Turner, who brilliantly plays a cautious, overprotective, fairly psychotic Mrs. Lisbon, is the mother who cannot disconnect her own identity from her daughters. She is only a success based on her daughters’ achievements, and she does not give them room to fail. She protects (or so she thinks) them to the point of hurting them, and, then they ultimately hurt themselves by taking their own lives. I see this parental behavior (perhaps to a lesser extreme!) all the time. Parents call to check on their 10th grade son who received a 91% on a test, a parent calls me three times a week for the past three months to try to understand why their child is socially removed (duh!) These parents are so fearful of their child’s failure, that their $20,000 a year investment will not pay off, that they are raising children who have no concept of over coming challenges and of finding their inner-strength, their own voice. Many of this kids live a life of fear, a fear they have learned from their folks.

My 11th grade year in high school, I was bombing Spanish and Math. My English teacher, who was also my advisor wrote to my parents in his end-of-the-year comments, “She is an outstanding English student, so she will never be a mathematician, but, alas, there is more to life.” He was allowing me to fail. He was giving me grace. He was telling me that I am a good, decent person, and I should still feel good about myself. Shouldn’t this the message kids should be getting?