The Kids These Days

The Kids These Days

My kids crack my heart open every day, with the picks and jacks of their voices.

And a lot of the time, it’s the absence of those same voices that does it, that most haunting kind of absence that is dually a presence.

But they also put it back together again, everyday, with those same voices and forgiving, curious eyes.

Sometimes they cannot complete their homework because they lose their one and only pencil on the bus, or they have to call the police to report things I have never seen.

But they show up anyway.

They show up, and they ask questions, and they laugh, and they smile, and they learn despite the fact that they are 12 and they already have to carry the world.

No one asked them if they could bear it. But they do.

They enjoy scavenger hunts, and scarf down ham sandwiches and Oreos and apple juice boxes from brown paper bags.

I am never bored when I am with them, and yet this work could not be more diametrically opposed to my life at college.

At school, my life is for myself alone.

My learning is for me.

The tasks at hand usually involve identifying and unraveling the most challenging and paradoxical interpretative problems I can find.

It’s never about the main idea, what the author meant. No one is ever given the benefit of the doubt. It’s always intricate, and daring, and wild, and fancy, and blind-siding.

Intellectual masturbation in a mirror with other intellectual masturbators. And it’s exciting and flattering and plenty fun.

Here, pushing my cranium to its limits no longer centers my days.

Now it’s about pushing my heart to the brink of extinction, until it feels like it will burst irreparably.

But it doesn’t.

And you go forth.

It’s no longer about being the smartest, about dismantling and wielding structures of language and logic, about winning and everyone knowing it.

It’s about making kids come alive.

It’s about plucking every string and hitting all the notes in the orchestra that is every class, until they find their instrument of choice, their singular voice, and they can play it themselves, out loud, without fear, all night long.

And in doing so, you inadvertently find your own.

Saying yes. Saying no.

Because you can, because you must.

If not you, then who?

It’s no longer about finding that microscopic insight that breaks century-old arguments.

It’s about finding that core idea, the concept you stake everything on - a lesson, a day (how much more now you understand the value of just one day), the whole wide world - and not letting go of it until it has come alive inside each and every busy, buzzing, brimming head and heart.

It’s about the basics. It’s about building the world up with them, all hands and all bricks on deck.

It’s about that one kid’s smile in recognition of the world coming into light.

It’s about simple things.

Writing your name with pride. Saying it out loud to your peers. Raising your hand, the flag of your own sovereignty.

My humanity has never been as challenged as much by anything as now, by teaching.

By this rag-tag team of twelve year olds, with their love of Selena Gomez and The Hunger Games. By their questions about pandas, and their giggles and their rapture over the mechanics of a chicken wing from the grocery store.

By having to forgive and offer, forgive and offer, again and again. 

It doesn’t matter if they don’t do your homework. If they don’t listen. If they chew bubble gum. It does, but it really doesn’t.

They are here, and that is everything. They are here, and so are you. 

Some of their questions I know how to answer. What’s the difference between a negative and a positive feedback loop?

Some I do not know how to begin to answer. I never will. How and why and how did people let the world get so messed up?

They live this question every day, and I can only open the door and call on them to ask and live it with me.