Posts Tagged ‘student’
As a school photographer, I take pictures at schools. It was only a matter of time before the school I student taught at would come up. I worried at first, given my history.
Fortunately, my initial anxiety proved unfounded — besides the customarily cool-blooded greeting I always got from a certain teacher, puzzled indignation from across the room by way of another, and an awkward, friendly joviality from the principal, taking pictures there was a blast. Of course, once word got around that I was on campus, and I use that cliche liberally, just a few familiar faces came up to say hello.
Four of my trouble students stopped by; since last semester, these now-juniors had decided to get back on track. As they left, I ensured they had their priorities straight.
You’re graduating; you’re going to college — right? All of them, unequivocally, gave me the right answer.
I accept it, because, as my master teacher had noted, even if they’re telling me what I want to hear, at least they’re hearing themselves say it. One of the students went as far as to say that I was his favorite teacher, and the reason he was doing better this semester, but I doubt it — his parents weren’t happy come open house, and he always did tend to gild the lily.
The long-haired pothead who played hooky more often than not, and was more than a little belligerent during my student teaching semester, got a buzzcut and earned a honor roll grade-point average this semester. Because he had the most dramatic turnaround, I took the time to get in one more piece of advice as he sauntered away:
Don’t aim for City College: Shoot for State.
What are you talking about? I’m shooting for Harvard.
That’s the spirit.
After a good 15 years in the public education system, I only knew how to do one thing well: classes. What I didn’t know boils down to merely everything else, including what it’s like to have a full-time job without a nametag.
I doubt a typical college student knows any real-life skills from college. College classes at most teach a clinical understanding about the outside world, and all the wider college experience has to offer involves ping-pong balls and plastic cups. Even though for our Beer Chugging regional champions, graduation is for quitters, but even the most adamant and decidedly average students choose to quit, eventually.
Graduating after five long years, our typical student spent the last four years cleaning up after that mess of a freshman year in the dorms. His expertise at grade substitution is unparalleled. The main office knows him by name.
He didn’t get here on much of a scholarship if anything at all. Because his fifth-generation Anglo-Irish heritage doesn’t lend itself well to scholarships, McAdequate is stuck with student loans, and merit-based scholarships are out of the question for this initiative-less loser.
Like most college students, he doesn’t have an internship and never applied. He doesn’t have a clue about how to succeed in life. He’s not prepared to do well, even if he has any confidence in the abilities he lacks.
He has no reason to prepare, he believes. His successes and failures in college will are not transferable units, are they? Do well in college, or poorly, and it doesn’t matter. His driving and criminal records will follow him, but McAdequate doesn’t have any outstanding warrants, and has only a few, scattered moving violations from back in his freshman year.
In everything else, he’s on his own.
On the other hand, his friend Perl already found a job, and she has barely a C+(+) average. She may be an information technologies major, but her success isn’t just because there will always be a future in computer maintenance. Perl succeeded because she took the initiative. She bothered finding an internship, and learning early on the skills in the job world.
She doesn’t need to pad her résumé with phenomenal personal greatnesses humbly veiled as weaknesses. She doesn’t need to exaggerate her job experience. That she has any job experience at all is a leg up on the McAverages who graduate in her field.
Maybe internships aren’t required because that’s the sort of initiative students need to find on their own. Even if McAverage did land that internship, it wouldn’t last. He’d go back to waiting tables. Perl will do something she likes, and will get paid a lot more.
Everyone’s a quitter, eventually — the only question is whether or not you have any initiative.
