I was at a workshop this morning enjoying the stylings of Myrlin Hepworth and I noticed how immature the students in the back of the room were. I started making attributions, remembering the ‘type of students’ that sit in the back of the room and thinking about maturity vs. immature behavior and really considering why students would act in this fashion. Let me begin by saying that I don’t teach high school. I’m a college professor and with that comes a built in set of expectations of student behavior. Of course, those expectations are shadowed by another set of expectations–the expectation that students are going to remain immature children who will create any opportunity to make the class stupid and rather pointless–in other words, they will create a reality that mirrors their concept of what class is.
I’m struggling between the two divergent sets of expectations. The standards are in fact a spectrum. On the one end you have immaturity. On the other hand you have understanding and commitment (perhaps misnamed). Two students showed up 30 minutes after the session began. These are the behaviors of children and children experience life (generally) in a carefree ‘in the moment’ sort of fashion. I don’t know that I entirely dislike that but I am working to appreciate it and to understand what it means.
To hear it from other instructors that immaturity comes from a lack of appreciation of the subject, from boredom, from an inability to connect with the material being shared, from nervousness, fear, apprehension, sometimes even as a direct result of the growing awareness that they are entering a world of responsibility and are utterly unprepared for that. This last impression of meaning stems from watching students live lives within the boundaries of everything they already know–in other words they never explore the world outside of the reality their parents created for them.
Maybe that’s okay. It isn’t okay for me or even for my job and role on this earth. My goal in life is to get people to realize that there is more–that they actually want more, which is often why I focus on the ones who are so limited and why so often they are the ones who piss me off the most.
Some Thoughts:
1. 1792 was the first year the USA celebrated Columbus Day. Thus began the indoctrination of a lie. I speak of it on the eve of another lie–the like of Easter. What is Easter supposed to represent? Easter predates the resurrection of Christ as does the tradition of Easter eggs (representing the struggle between good and evil) and the idea of resurrection as embodied by the Phoenix. None of this has anything to do with a bunny either, so what the heck are we celebrating?