Every semester, my last classes are about endings. I receive papers on the subject and, before that, spend four classes brainstorming with students and helping them revise their drafts. Each semester I realize it is not just an academic exercise: Endings are all around us, and we must learn to handle them gracefully.
This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre and data from booksellers. Information on the books below came from The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 6, 2009.
2009 Children’s Books Recommended by The New York Times
1. The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo (Ages 8-13)
2. The Great and Only Barnum by Candace Fleming (Ages 8-12)
3. The Secret Circus by Johanna Wright (Ages 2-6)
4. Fire by Kristin Cashore (Ages 14 and up)
5. Flawed Dogs by Berkeley Breathed (Ages 8-12)
6. A Book of Sleep by Il Sung Na (Ages 1-5)
7. Not Last Night But the Night Before by Colin McNaughton (Ages 4 and up)
8. It’s a Secret! by John Burningham (Ages 3-6)
9. Creature ABC by Andrew Zuckerman (Ages 3 and up)
10. Life-Size Zoo by Teruyuki Komiya with photographs by Toyofumi Fukuda (Ages 3 and up)
For my students, the end of the semester is a time to rejoice. They are “free,” able to sleep late or travel or return to their families. Many are able to earn next semester’s tuition by working during winter break; gone are the years when students just sat around and watched TV between semesters. But their teachers who, like me, witness the cycle every semester know better. We know the end of a semester or year is an emblem of more weighty endings in our lives. How we end interim experiences may mirror how we will end relationships, jobs or even our lives. Endings are emblematic of greater finalities.
Students who stick their heads in the sand because they become overwhelmed with work at the end leave an impression of weakness and cowardice. Any psychological meltdown should be accompanied by responsible e-mails to professors, arranging due dates and meetings to discuss their performance. Slipping out of sight is not a good ending for school, for relationships, for life.
Students who just mark time, do the minimum, and waltz out of the last class and head straight to a party are also hiding from realities. The parallel in our personal lives would include people who end relationships with the philosophy that there are “plenty of fish in the sea” and that they “can do better.” Without introspection, we don’t learn from failed relationships and are doomed to repeat past mistakes.
Even in the benign ending of a single class, reflection is healthy and leads to improved performance. If we don’t ask ourselves what we could have done better in our academic pursuits, any improvement in the future might be pure accident. But once we think about what we have done well and what we could have done better, we are in a position to put those assessments into practice for the next challenge.
Students who reflect on what they’ve been doing, and recognize their weaknesses and strengths, are the kinds of students who make wonderful interns, graduate students and employees. They are the ones who, in their final papers, look at ended friendships, grandparents’ deaths, homes they’ve had to leave and jobs they’ve walked away from and know these are not just narratives that become part of a grade for a paper. They also aren’t merely line items on their resumes or painful experiences to leave behind.
Those students know these events are all emblems of how to end parts of their lives and how to end them well — with dignity. They realize it’s not about the final grade but about the effort they have made to achieve that result. They understand that endings usually lead to new beginnings — a chance to redeem themselves by putting into practice what they’ve learned from the past. Those students are wise enough to see that endings are lessons for the future, not mere finalities.
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
