Teachers often wonder what happens to students who were bored by our classes. What are they doing? What sparked a passion in college? Former students who return to say hello are usually the ones who were engaged all along.
One answer arrived Friday morning in the form of a student who had taken Senior Seminar, which I teach with Eliot Waxman.
After memorizing the posters on my wall — “By the way, Dr. Jacobs, you really should make some changes!” — Alex graduated two years ago and joined AmeriCorps, an organization Eliot had once worked with.
Standing before 55 students on the first Friday morning of their senior year, Alex removed the blinders of the college application rat race, and spoke about his year of public service. He began by mirroring the feelings of many as he remembered being in that very room, wondering what to do with his life, and finding no answers.
“Joining AmeriCorps was the best decision I ever made.” He spoke of the opportunity to see other parts of the United States, of the family feeling among his co-workers, of his newly acquired sense of perspective in leaving behind affluent Northern Virginia for sites of devastation.
One of his most memorable days occurred after Hurricane Rita. He and two co-workers were driving to an affected town on the Gulf of Mexico. They were driving past bayous and more bayous, and suddenly saw a doublewide trailer in the middle of the road. There was no cleared area nearby where it might once have stood.
“All we saw was spray-paint: an Allstate policy number, and then GOD BLESS EVERYONE. At that moment we knew it was really bad. Then we drove ten more minutes to town, in total silence. I have goose bumps talking about it right now.”
At that moment, our classroom was silent as well. It was sobering to remember that our own narrow concerns are just that — narrow.
For me, seeing Alex — now attending George Mason University — meant a lot on several levels. Although he was capable, he didn’t love English. He had listened in government class just enough to learn about AmeriCorps.
But despite his disengagement from school, he liked the class and was absorbing information. While memorizing my posters, he was struck with “Hamlet, the most complicated person I’d ever seen,” he said. Even James Joyce’s “Dubliners” took root.
“You never know when you will draw on what you’ve learned,” he wisely told students. “I was talking to a local resident of a small town and noticed he had some books. I asked him what he was reading; it was Shakespeare and Joyce. So then we talked about the irony of the man with green eyes in ‘Dubliners.’ You just never know what will make a connection.”
But now I knew what had happened to Alex, and my students knew that being a superstar and getting into the University of Virginia or the College of William and Mary early decision is just one option.
The alternative isn’t failure. A lack of direction can become an opportunity to affect hundreds of others, among them your former English and government teachers and their students.
Erica Jacobs teaches at Oakton High School and George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
