Half-Baked

This is the time of year when everyone gets tired.  The weather has changed, and the days are getting shorter.  The students are no longer in the honeymoon period of behaving well in class.  They have gotten to know their teachers well enough to really start pushing the line on what they can get away with.  We start seeing what they are like under pressure.  It is the time of year when teachers start worrying about some character traits they may or may not be seeing in their students.

Because teachers love their students, we stress over them.  If they are making poor decisions in their personal lives, cheating on our tests, or just plain acting foolish, we are concerned about their future.  In Christian schools, like the one I teach in, we are concerned about what those behaviors reflect regarding the condition of their hearts.  Cheating on a test isn't just a behavior; it is a reflection of something much deeper, self-worship.  Bad choices in their personal lives may do damage to their reputation, but we are more concerned about the damage it does to their character.  Because of these concerns, teachers do a fair amount of hand-wringing and fretting.  We talk a lot about what their issues mean for their future.

Then I remember that my students are eighteen when they graduate.  We don't send them out into the world as finished products, and we aren't the last influences they will have in their lives.  There will be professors and ministers and friends and mentors after us who will continue the process of maturing them into the adults they will one day be.

I remind myself that no one eats a half-baked cake.  I love to eat cake batter.  I may like it even more than I like the final cake.  As much as I like them both, I would never put a cake in the oven for half the time and then complain when I took it out of the oven that it wasn't cake yet and wasn't batter anymore.  I would recognize that the oven was only half way through the process of turning batter into cake.  This is where my students are.  They aren't the squishy little sweet babies they once were, but they aren't fully formed adults yet either.  They are in the weird place that cake would be, half-baked.  We can't complain that they aren't babies anymore, and we can't complain that they aren't adults yet.  They aren't supposed to be.  They are in the middle of the process we call growing up.

Teachers will always worry.  We know that there are mistakes they can make that will impact the adult they become.  Just like a cake would be ruined if we opened the oven door and threw in a handful of dirt, a person can be negatively impacted by what happens in high school.  However, we need to keep this time in proper perspective and recognized.  They are not yet who they will be.