I teach sometimes at a city high school with nearly 2000 students, many of whom are from the most affluent parts of town. They arrive by their own  car, by subway or bus, on foot or dropped off by family, from all around the city – and they mostly come because the instruction is top notch and the school even offers super-enrichment, fully bilingual programming and the International Baccalaureat option. 

I also teach at suburban and inner city schools that serve the poor and those settings are much rowdier, a little more prone to gang violence and the tone is much different in the classroom.

That is not to say the children of the wealthy are easier to teach per se.  Sometimes they are very arrogant, dismissive of caretaker staff to the point of insult, and they drop their garbage around without a sense of responsibility.  In the schools of the poor those who bothered to turn up for class often have a sense of mission and a really strong sense of hierarchy, authority and discipline.  Ironic really.  The children of the poor are often easier to teach because they think the teacher may know something while the children of the rich may assume the teacher is a failed career person at something higher.

One might assume that drugs would abound in the schools of the poor, with drug dealers and pimps even and I am sure that is true. But drugs are also a big problem at the schools of rich kids, and the drugs are higher cost ones – cocaine for instance.  Teachers overhear or think they overhear smidgens of conversations which are troubling. Kids in discussion or in writing journals may sometimes admit to the social pressure there is even at schools of the rich to use drugs.

So no student  has a free ride and no teaching job is easy by definition.

What I am reassured by though is seeing good parenting in both types of schools.  I love it when parents are spoken highly of by big tough teenage boys.  In a world where stores automatically distrust teens and post signs “no more than 3 teens at one time’, it is reassuring to see that mostly teens actually are turning out OK.

Last week I was asked to mark many written exams of students who wanted credit for senior high French courses. These exams are called ‘challenge exams’ and are open to those who speak French already or studied it before, who feel they have the skills of the lower level high school courses and want credit for them without having to take the lessons. The exams have a spoken test and a written component that can be quite grueling if you do not in fact speak the language.

I was asked to look through written compositions about a teen’s daily activities, some events from childhood so the teen would use the past tense, and some dreams for the future, so the teen would use the future tense.    Although it is possible to lie I really feel that the teens did not very much – why would they?  They may as well tell true anecdotes.

The stories were endearing.  The teen who gets home from school every day and walks the dog, and admits it in writing that the dog is part of his day.  The teen who played in the high school soccer team, went on a tournament last year to another city and who had a great time just being part of a traveling team.  The player who scored the winning goal and the joy it brought him. The  hockey players who went on other team trips and lost but rationalized the great experience anyway. 

Several teens who said when they were little they had boundless energy and talked all the time who felt that now they were calmer. The girl who said she lied so much about people that her parents had to sit her down when aged 5 and talk to her about honesty. And the time she screamed so loud that her sister was hurting her that neighbors called the police, only to find out it was yet another exaggeration.

The girl who does acrobatic skiing who admitted to mistiming one rotation and hitting her head hard on the snow, getting a concussion- and how she in a half-daze phoned her mother to come get her but slurred her words so much the mom came right away.

The girl who said when she was about four her sister threw her in the creek. It is a memory the family laughs at now.

The car accidents of family members, a mother’s broken leg, a grandma’s plodding help around the house. The invitation to a friend to feel welcome because the mother is  a good cook.

The oddities of illness of early childhood for these are the survivors. The one who was in intensive care for weeks. The one who is partly deaf due to an infection that did not heal.
The one whose parents monitored her health very closely for years and now she is of robust health but she was very sickly when young.

The death of a family pet and how hard it was on the teen’s family

Pride in younger siblings and older ones, something you rarely would hear about out loud.

And I heard of good parenting.  Of the girl who the third day after getting her driver’s license had an accident,  her fault, backing into a delivery truck. Her panic was very real and she was afraid when the other driver approached her but relieved when he was only asking if she was OK. Her tearful call to her dad and his reaction- ‘he laughed’.  The way the family came immediately to drive her home and to take the car to a mechanic, and then the ongoing repair bill she is willingly repaying. All the elements of reassurance, acceptance, help and still instilling responsibility. It was a beautiful thing.

I see pride kids have in their parents. Even one teen admitted to me that his mother’s boyfriend was only in his twenties.  A whole story there for sure but the teen was not ashamed – just intrigued.  I realized how easy it is to step on the self of a child if anyone dared to insult his one anchor, his home, as less than worthy. It is all he has.
 

And the inadvertent humor of French errors. The girl who wanted to say she had gotten used to a new friend who meant to say “Je me suis habitueé a lui” but who used by mistake “Je me suis habillee avec lui’ and who said it over and over – and it means’ I got dressed with him”.

Kids in big high schools wear very thick protective shells around themselves. They have to. It is a hostile world, not just from other kids, gangs, possibly hostile or vindictive teachers but even sometimes from their own friends if they turn on them.  It may seem like a gossipy cliquey world but it is a volatile one with fast changes of allegiance.  Kids are very very careful who knows what about them.

And that means it is a privilege sometimes to get into that world, to hear sometimes what they are thinking, their joys of the past, their quiet dreams, their fears and frustrations and to discover they are so ordinary, so insecure, so human.

The assignment was to write an invitation letter to the friend of your sibling, someone from Paris, who would be visiting your own family and staying with you for a few weeks. It was to be an invitation to describe the family and what lay ahead for the invitee.

To a one the letters were more than descriptive. They were good hosts. They clearly were willing to share their lives, their hobbies, their shopping excursions, trips to the mountains, music enthusiasm, parties and their friends with this new mythical person.  They were writing about what bedroom to sleep in, what time they got up and  what they ate for breakfast, pretty clearly personal details and they were willing to let this stranger in.

Yes you may say it was an academic exercise. But it was a little more than that too. It was a capsule view of today’s young adults, how they open up to the world they do not know and what anchors of security they take with them into it.

I am more than reassured they are being raised for the most part, with great love.  The wealthy seem to have the privilege more often of families currently with two parents, intact and with some security of housing. That is no small gift.  But the poor have no less love and the kids do know it. 

It is not just something that matters. It is nearly all that matters as they head out.