I am a teacher.
I have been in the field of education just shy of 20 years. I have an undergraduate degree in communications and three graduate degrees in education, including a doctorate. I work in the education department of a statewide educational organization serving at-promise youth and I adjunct for the local university.
As teachers, we secretly (or maybe not so secretly) hope all our students go to college. That doesn't necessarily mean all of them will, but we want them to have the opportunity to go, if this is what they want. Or maybe we just tell them that's what they want. After all, people who want to be successful go to college, right?
Over the past few years, the pendulum has swung back a little bit. Student loan debt countrywide, has climbed drastically, and trade-related jobs are more plentiful than other kinds of jobs. Students are shying away from incurring debt, and high schools are offering programs to try and prepare students to enter directly into the workforce after high school. After all, our standards explicitly state the goal of making our students college
and career ready.
It's all good, right? There is absolutely nothing wrong with learning trade skills in high school and jumping into a job after graduation, especially if you need to support yourself or help support your family. It's perfectly respectable to go to trade school and learn additional skills that are immediately applicable in the workplace. We need tradespeople arguably more than we need college graduates. And if you can't afford college, there's nothing to consider anyway. Maybe some day.
I am a mother.
I was raised by divorced parents. My dad has a law degree, my mom an associates degree because she left college to be with my dad who was ahead of her in school. That's what women did back then. College was the expectation. My dad worked his way through law school and my mom, after the divorce, insisted my sister and I finish college before we ever considered getting married.
I kept that promise to my mom, and so did my sister. We both attended and graduated college. It was never something we considered. We just did it. And we both wanted to. My sister to study art, and me, well I thought I wanted to be a doctor and somehow discovered my true calling was to be a teacher.
I got engaged to my high school sweetheart in my final semester of college. Like my mom, he left after almost two years in college. But he didn't leave for me. He left for him. He never wanted to go to college in the first place. At least not the one his parents chose for him. He joined a fraternity, drank a lot, and floundered because they wanted him to declare a major. He had no idea what to declare, so somehow he became an education major. Even to this day, people are encouraged to choose teaching as a back-up option. Sad.
Three years after we married, we had our first and only child, Jacob. There were signs early on of his intelligence. Late walker, early talker, he seemed to love words. Teachers never want to be the ones to identify their own kids as bright, so I waited for a couple of teachers to point it out. And they did. When it was clear he wouldn't struggle to learn to read, I sighed of relief. As a teacher I knew this was the biggest hurdle of his school life. A wealthy relative set up a college fund for him, and by the time he graduated high school it was enough to cover all 4 years and maybe more. The second biggest hurdle of school life, done.
I've written about my son and the challenges we dealt with in his school career. There were lots of signs this day was coming. I'll leave that to the side for now. But by the time he got to his senior year in high school, he was less than concerned about applying to and getting into college. He put all his eggs in one basket, knowing that his back-up plan was the local university for which he more than met the admission criteria. Basket school sent a rejection letter and back-up school took him.
School grades were never reflective of my son's learning so I was relieved when he got into college.
Fast forward through low excitability about moving into the dorm, last minute registration for classes, and less than informative chats about how things were going with classes. By Thanksgiving weekend, my son announced he didn't want to be in college. He wasn't depressed, or having trouble fitting in on campus. The social aspect was fine. He just didn't want to be in school anymore. Period. He told us it was a waste of money because he just wasn't motivated to be in school and go to classes. He wants to get a full time job.
The contradiction.
I was somewhat crushed. It took me a couple of weeks crying, on and off, to process and get through the notion that my son doesn't want to go to college. I'm trying. "Mom, it doesn't mean I never want to go," he said possibly to comfort me. I'm holding onto this and hoping he decides one day when he's ready. I can't help it.
But I got to thinking. It's really hard to be a parent. And I think there's a certain challenge to being a teacher
and a parent. Pedagogically I may believe one thing, but when it's my own kid it somehow feels different. Let me give you a similar example, more relatable to more people. Most people in this country, despite what politics tries to say, support our military. We honor those who serve and have served. We support those who are on duty and in combat, whether we agree with the policies around where and why our troops are deployed or not. But if we don't come from military families, it's sometimes hard to accept when our children choose to be soldiers. Why? Not because of disrespect for the military, but for the safety and well-being of our children.
This is the contradiction I'm living through now. On paper, and as a teacher, I don't believe people must go to college to be successful. There are certainly plenty of examples out in the world of people who achieve great success without a college degree. Some of them return to school later in life, and others go on to be successful without ever going to college. But when it's my kid, it just feels different. I want him to be happy, and successful, and educated. I just have to accept that his version of this might be different from mine.
I'm not going to lie. I worry. I worry about how he will feel in crowds of people. I worry how women will feel about him. I worry about whether he'll hit road blocks without a degree. I worry that he will struggle financially. I worry that I have developed a bit of elitism in achieving my own level of education. The teacher in me wants him to love and value education as much as I do.
But here's the reality. My son is a learner. It may not be in the traditional formal schooling sense, but he's a learner. He's just a bit of a nonconformist and a risk taker. In this way, he is not like me at all. I'm a bit of a rule follower. I'm a bit of a people pleaser. I have to accept that we are not the same. And if I am to truly be the kind of parent I have always strived to be, I have to let him find his own happiness, not my definition of what his happiness should be.
The teacher in me is giving the mom in me a lesson.
