As I prepare for my upcoming spring semester class, I remember that teaching seniors can be a tricky thing. Although stories of “senioritis” are common and sometimes disturbing, we can also view this unique time in the life of a teenager as our final moments with them. It’s the last time that we can impart to them the “stuff” we want them to know, or we can try to make sure that they have the requisite skills to be successful at the next level. But we do so at the risk of our own frustration as we realize that they’re not really with us one hundred percent. Their focus is bifurcated between the world they’re living in currently and the one they’re going to inhabit in eight months. So, what do we really want to teach them in the last months we have with them?
I thought about this recently while reading an excellent new biography of Abraham Lincoln and listening to a fascinating podcast on the Persian Sufi poet Rumi. Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and Slavery in America tells the story of our sixteenth President’s grappling with “the peculiar institution” and the revising of his views on slavery over the course of his life. From his childhood in Kentucky and Indiana to his famous debates with Senator Stephen Douglas to his announcing the Emancipation Proclamation until his death, Lincoln’s view towards slavery evolved with the events occurring in the country. While many leaders held steadfast to opinions that failed to move with the times, Lincoln was able to reflect and acknowledge the need for change when presented with a new set of facts.
As Foner says at the end of his book,. “Lincoln did not enter the White House expecting to preside over the destruction of slavery. A powerful combination of events, as we have seen, propelled him down the road to emancipation and then to a reconsideration of the place blacks would occupy in a post-slavery America. Of course, the unprecedented crisis in which, as one member of Congress put it, ‘the events of an entire century transpire in a year,’ made change the order of the day. Yet, as the presidency of his successor demonstrated, not all men placed in a similar situation possessed the capacity for growth, the essence of Lincoln’s greatness. ‘I think we have reason to thank God for Abraham Lincoln,’ the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote one week before his death. ‘With all his deficiencies, it must be admitted that he has grown continuously; and considering how slavery had weakened and perverted the moral sense of the whole country, it was great good luck to have the people elect a man who was willing to grow.’” (336)
Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give our students as they have one foot out the door is encouraging their innate desire to learn and to grow. We can show them that no matter one’s age, we are always developing and changing, and this is what it means to be human. We can show them that a hunger to learn is not something artificial that we ask of high school students; on the contrary, it is an integral component of being a whole human being. We are all works in progress. Lincoln was not the Lincoln we’ve come to know when he was a young attorney or when he was elected President. It was in his capacity to grow that he became one of our greatest elected officials; maybe this should be the accomplishment of his that we celebrate and attempt to emulate.
All too often, students leave high school burnt out and not having the fire in the belly to learn more. We need to challenge them to be open to and excited about the possibilities of growth and development. They need to know that as far along as they are, they are only beginning the process of becoming who they will be, and they need to be ready for what may come their way.
Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz from Washington University-St. Louis explains a similar concept when she discusses some of the lessons we can learn from the poetry of the Muhammad Jalal al-Din al-Balkhi al-Rumi in her interview with Christa Tippett on the American Public Media show Being. “On one level, you have to get on the road. You have to get started. You know, just like the earth that you know, have to plow the earth, you have to get moving. On another level, time and again, he reminds us that the destination is the journey itself. So there isn't a point where you say, 'OK, I'm here, I've reached, I'm done, I'm perfect. I don't need to do anything anymore.' In the incompleteness of that, the need to move forward is inherent in that incompleteness, in the process of going forward, that you make yourself better and better and you, in a way, never reach. So the separation is the powerful force that keeps you going. If you ever felt that, 'I have arrived, I've reached, this is it,' then you wouldn't go any further.”
If our seniors graduate excited about their next steps, confident in their ability to handle the world they are about to inhabit, and both humble and enthusiastic about the earth they will plow, then we can feel good about the work we have done with them.
