As a teacher, this is the time of year where I give out final exams and watch my students sweat out (not nearly as much as I’d like) their preparations for their final grade in the class. Some students are in a pretty good position and therefore, are a bit more relaxed entering the fray. Other students are on the border line and to whatever extent they are concerned of passing or failing, they approach the test accordingly. Yet, one more category of student exists that trumps all of those – the senior in danger of failing. This senior can run the gamut, from almost pathologically worried to blithely unconcerned. Yet, for the latter, their failure and failing to see the importance of the situation is not entirely their fault.
From the early years of our education system, chances are given ad nauseam. Last chances are given in primary and middle school – the social promotion the reader may have heard education leaders and specialists deny exists any longer. Yet it does. Many administrators have approached the end of the year with the best intentions. “This year, a parent will not browbeat me into passing their kid” or “This year, I will stand firm and say that little Timmy cannot take part in sixth (or eighth grade) graduation ceremonies.” Yet, again and again, school districts “knuckle under and crawl” to the demands of the parents who approach school officials like defense attorneys.
Once in high school, a freshman student has been taught over the course of the last eight years that in the end, things will work out, they will pass, they will move on. Parents are equally lulled to sleep by this expectation to the point, they barely come to the school any longer except to send one last salvo of objection and indignation at a school system that would fail his/her child. The later in the school year it is, the greater the outrage. It would be comical were it not done at the expense of a child’s sense of their own entitlement. After years of being passed along by over-sympathetic, misguided or pressured teachers and administrators, the young minnow reaches the twelfth grade with visions of cap and gowns, graduation ceremonies and parties and the ultimate freedom they constantly crave but secretly fear. The parents, by this stage, only come to the school for rewards or other recognitions of their child’s greatness. They have put in the work to ensure that nothing trips up their student’s path to success. Surely, no teacher would fail a student in the senior year.
Yet, they get the personal pronoun wrong and it creates the tension that characterizes the last months of school. In my case this year, both students were given multiple opportunities to bring up their grade but they did not take advantage of this. Both child and parent have been conditioned by the failings and lack of moral toughness of the school system. In an effort to constantly fret over the short term, we’ve created a monster incapable of considering the long term. A naturally egotistical and self-absorbed demographic is catered to with immediate considerations, with no thought to the long-term impact of our actions upon the student and their work ethic.
It is the end of May and I have two seniors that will not graduate. I look at them and it pains me to think what we have wrought. They have been looking forward to the senior year and all the accolades that comes to a person who legitimately matriculates towards college or a career. Yet, they will not make the connection between their efforts and their results. What will happen to those two students? Will they understand why they failed? The student’s parents are no longer a concern because the student is now an adult. Yet, what tools have they been given to deal with their upcoming failure? In the next week, I will see the anguished jeremiads of students and parents (and administrators) and the real tragedy is they are crying about the wrong thing.
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