Alumni Visits

I'm pretty tired from yearbook distributions and exam prep this week, so this one will be short.

This time of year, colleges are getting out for the summer while high schools are still finishing up.  At GRACE, that means one of our favorite things, visits from alumni (we missed these so much last year when visitors weren't allowed in the building).  In the past two weeks, I've had hallway chats or long conversations with students who graduated last year, graduated in lockdown, or graduated so long ago that they are now graduating college.  In some ways, these conversations are all the same.  "What classes did you take this year?  What are your plans?  Do you feel like you were well prepared?"  Yet, each conversation is different because each student is different.  One boy has changed his major because he realized his hobby would stop being enjoyable if he tried to make a living at it.  One girl has changed her mind five or six times and may be in college a couple of extra years.  One girl found her passion early and stuck with it.  Some are still searching because their first year of college wasn't exactly normal.  

What they all had in common was a sense of joy in talking to us, their high school teachers, about what they are doing now.  They understand that we meant what we wrote in their yearbooks - that we want to know how they are doing.  We are invested in the adults they are becoming, and they remember that enough to spend some of their free time coming to their old school building to talk to us.  We don't take that for granted because most of us did not return to our schools to visit.  I think I went one time, but it was to talk to one specific teacher, but some of these students spend hours traveling down the hall, stopping into room after room and return if one of the teachers they wanted to talk to wasn't there when they stopped by.

When I'm having a tough day with students, I find it helpful to think of them as half-baked (in the sense that they aren't done maturing yet).  No one would eat a cake halfway through the bake time because that would be gross.  This is true with kids too.  They are not yet who they will become, so it isn't fair to judge them when the process isn't complete.  These visits show who they are farther into the process, and they are a good reminder to have a broader view of students.