“We want to be known but not to be memorized as though we cannot change.”
- Beth Moore in All My Knotted Up Life: A Memoir
Once, I was making a seating chart for my physics class at the beginning of the year. One of our maintenance staff came in and saw what I was doing.
- "Oh, it's so awful you have Seth Morris (fictional name). He's the worst!" he said.
- I tried to ignore him, but he wasn't the kind of person who read social cues, so he kept talking, going on and on about this young man.
- "I like him a lot," I replied. "He's bouncy, and that takes some energy to manage, but I'll take that over kids who won't participate."
It turned out that the one experience this man had with Seth was when he trashed a bathroom during an extracurricular event when he in the 7th grade. This kid was in my physics class his junior year, which means it had been four years since the event that this man was still holding against him.
I think about that conversation sometimes, wishing I had handled it differently.
- I wish I had said, "Yeah, he was a twerp in the 7th grade. We all were. I'm glad no one holds my 7th grade twerp behavior against me now."
- I wish I had said, "This kid is just trying to grow the heck up, and it would help if you got out of his way."
- I wish I had confronted him in some way that might have prevented him from doing this in the future with other kids.
- Alas, I did not do any of those things. Hindsight is always sharper.
In one of my favorite works by C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, the character known as The Green Lady describes learning in terms of agin. Every time Ransom explains something to her from Earth culture, she thanks him for making her older than she was before. We presume as people get older, they have experiences that teach them new things; her description was simply an alteration of that idea. Seth, from my earlier story, had grown a lot between his 7th grade year and his junior year, and he was no longer a bathroom trasher. In fact, he was likely the one who would have helped you clean up after an event.
The reason this is on my mind today is that I had an interaction earlier this week. There is a young man who comes into the Y every day. I'll call him Kadeen. He's a handful, and he certainly hasn't been taught respectful interactions with adults, but I have seen him exhibit moments of kindness (like giving someone an extra bag of chips that came out of the vending machine). I was mentioning something about finding an item for him in lost and found the day before, and one of the women I work with starting talking about what a horrible kid he was and how he would likely end up behind bars someday. "I know I shouldn't think this way, but I do," she said. I said, "I've seen him have some sweet moments, so there's some good in there somewhere. We'll see what happens as he gets older" She wasn't having it. Setting aside how annoying I find it when people can't agree that I have seen something if they weren't around to see it, I said, "I've known a lot of kids who seemed that way when they were young but changed a lot as they aged." Long after we had ended this conversation, she brought it back up, saying he was one of those people who would have to hit rock bottom before anything changed. This kid is 13 years old! Are we really writing his future off already?
If you know me, you know I am not saying some such nonsense as "There are no bad kids, only bad circumstances." We are all sinners in need of grace and mercy. (Even if you aren't a person of religious faith, you know that we are all more likely to do the wrong thing than the right thing if it serves us better.) What I am saying is that people change, and kids are not yet who they will one day become. I had a shorthand with the teacher next door to me. We used to look at each other and say, "Half baked." It was our reminder that the kids weren't done yet. They wouldn't even be done when they graduated. Just like no one would take a cake out of the oven half way through the baking process and toss it out because it was a mess. Of course it's a mess; it isn't finished yet. Of course your students are a mess; they aren't finished yet. (Oh, man I just had the weirdest memory of a song from 80s kids' church - "Kids Under Construction")
There's a sentence that frequently pops up on social media - "When someone shows you who they are, believe them." And I don't disagree with that statement if we are talking about an adult who has exhibited a pattern and shows no signs of remorse. It is likely that person is acting out of his well-established character, and this is unlikely to change without a fairly large intervention involving repentance. But when people show genuine signs of change, we should allow that, even if we are cautious in doing so.
And when we are talking about kids, it's important to recognize that they are not just small adults; their character is being molded by every experience they have. We should be honored and humbled that we are part of that; it's an awesome responsibility. While we hold kids accountable for their actions through discipline, we recognize that those very actions might help them to change (the root of discipline is disciple, so it should be teaching them something). If we see a change in pattern, celebrate that as a success. Don't hold the action they've already been disciplined for against them months and years.
One of the things I will miss this year about being in the classroom is that I won't have the opportunity to write college recommendation letters. Writing those for kids I had known since middle school (and sometimes seen since elementary school) was an annual reminder of how God uses the process of maturing, learning, discipline, and experience to make us older, not only in the chronological sense but in the Green Lady sense.
May we all be older at the end of the day than we were at the beginning.
And recognizing that in ourselves, let us allow it in others too.
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