Authored by Hannah Williams-Inman
On this edition of If Only You Knew, I (definitely didn’t run out of time, needed to audible and) decided to flip my own script. For the past two installments, I have been connecting with students in the Middle School, and asking them to let me behind the curtain a bit, to help us all better understand some of the complexities of being a middle school student at this moment, in this place. In the craziness and slog of February, at the end of a particularly long week, I, honestly, needed a break from kid noises. Not wanting to miss any deadlines (given to be by my most fearsome and not-at-all-understanding leader Dr. Julie Rust), and needing to whip this out real quick before heading on an overnight field trip/slumber party with the 8th graders, polling the adult voices felt more manageable than the kids’. And thus was born the third installment of If Only You Knew: Teacher Time.
I asked some of my colleagues, “Friends. Besides everything, what do you wish these kids knew? What do you wish you could say to them?” A better way to ask this may have been to say, “What lesson do you wish would just stick?” We spend so much time trying to impart wisdom to these tweens and teens, and, usually, are trying to drive the same lessons home over and over again. Right now, the proverbial hammer has come down on Middle School students not being in the places they’re supposed to be, or inside the boundaries that have been drawn and clearly stated to them (as though the hammer has not been coming down repeatedly ALL DANG YEAR). We tell them repeatedly, daily, HOURLY that the expectation is that they are where they can be found at any time, and STILL we are having to “catch” a wanderer and “release” them to Mr. Cooper (dun-dun-dun) for him to try, try again to be a consistent, predictable adult, that doles out those logical consequences when they’re earned. Bless him for that.
Author’s note: Not to make this about me, but one thing I wish the kids could remember is that, as he has proven in a beautiful way in his first year as our head of the Middle School, Mr. Cooper will. not. get. tired. of. consistently and fairly communicating expectations. In his own words, “This is the work.”
Author’s note: If I’d had the chance to ask Buck what he wished would stick with these kids, my guess is he would have said, “I wish they’d learn that we’re reeeeally good at catching them.”
For those of you familiar with some of our middle school faculty, I’ll let you have one guess which coworker had this completely efficient and systems oriented response to my query: “If we give you time in class to do something, just do it then!” I love this, because to our adult brains, it makes perfect sense to complete our tasks in the time allotted for the task. Maybe it’s been too long since I was a teenager, but given the choice between homework or no-homework, my computer games were always on hold. I basically didn’t have homework all of high school because I was using my class time so regularly. Of course, the computer-sized elephant in the room in 2024 is that social media is intentionally designed to suck up all of their attention, and not even me and my best performance (and I give a good performance) can compete with all of that. But like… c’mon!
Now, to be fair to these delightful pre-adolescents, the majority of them are, in fact, using their time wisely and doing their work well. Especially at St. A, on the whole, our student body is efficient and motivated, and works hard to achieve great things. They are so good, and achieve so highly… but procrastinators will procrastinate, and, without a doubt, the kids who need the most prompting to do their in-class work DURING CLASS are the ones who would forget to do it for homework anyway. That idea alone makes me chuckle. And whoever you’re thinking of right now, bless them too.
Author’s note: My personal favorite thing to say to a student not using their time effectively is, “Just stop procrastinating.” Works every time.
Author’s note: I am cracking myself up writing these author’s notes as if this whole blog isn’t just one big author’s note… why am I like this?
Now this next one… this hits. The next colleague I spoke with (read: the next closest person to me during dismissal on a Friday afternoon) said that they wished the kids could remember that “We are literally so tired.” And y’all, there’s no tired like A-Teacher-In-February-tired. I don’t even have anything inspirational for this one, only that, as time has proven to us again and again, February will end, quarter 3 will wrap up, and the rest of the year will fly by. If you need me for the rest of this month, I’ll be over here limping through, trying my best (and maybe failing) to practice gratitude, thankful to be a part of the work with you all.
Almost like I planned it, we segue nicely into our final piece of hopeful dreaming for our students, which is that they would “Be grateful.” The colleague who shared this with me gracefully and graciously leads their class through many discussions during the year that ask them to acknowledge their own privilege in the face of some of their class content. He helps keep them grounded in the present reality of the gifts we have been given: attending or working at a school like St. Andrew’s, having some of the experiences afforded to us by this school, and getting to be with each other in these classrooms, to name a few. He wishes, despite the adolescent reality that everything is either: 1) unfair or 2) all about them, that our students could remember that we are lucky to be where we are, with these good people.
And speaking of good people, to those of you that are still with me, you get the third “blessing” of this blog post. Bless you. I will practice some gratitude with you before we part ways: I am grateful for you, grateful for these kids, and grateful for this job. Even in February.