OMGosh! OMGosh! School starts on Monday! I can't believe it. I'm one mixed bag of excitement and nerves...mostly excitement though. My mom has been kind enough to use all the gift certificates she gets as a first grade teacher (a huge advantage over teaching at a high school mind you!) on a going-back-to-school/girl day for the two of us. It's the perfect end to a mostly perfect summer. I'm going skydiving as well tomorrow; it seems to be a fitting end.

So I was getting my hair cut this morning and talking to the hairdresser about lots of stuff, and we talked a lot about the media, advertising and the youth. I think I found words for what I want to change about education. I want education to provide students with a sense of self, sense of meaning in their lives, and a sense of purpose. Isn't this what life is about anyway?

The best example I can think of relates to consumerism. Everyday I see girls and boys walk down the school hallways dressed to impress, and for most of them this means wearing as little as possible or flashy as possible. I had a particularly difficult time with a student who I will call M. M is very good at basketball but had to quit the team when he failed his first class. Quitting the team coincided with M adopting a new look and one flashy, shimmery, cheapy gold watch. It seems that once M was no longer to play basketball and be an athlete he needed to adopt a new identity so he would be somebody, if anybody, in the eyes of his peers. M (and his gold watch) was one of my most difficult students all year and I believe my inability to connect with him on a meaningful level contributed to the painful demise of one of my junior sections. The kicker is, as it seems to be in many such cases, that M is smart, quick mentally and is open to exploring the world from multiple perspectives.

I believe M has become apathetic towards his life because he doesn't know who M is, he has no sense of self. Self is not a basketball, a jump shot, or the way other people treat athletes. Self is not a watch, it's not the way other people look at that watch, and it's not respect gained from others by being disrespectful to teachers. All these things are not an identity and really don't provide us with a sense of self. If anything, they leave us feeling emptier because somewhere deep down we know that these things do not reflect our innermost feelings about whom we are. Of course I don't know if this is the case with M, but given my own experiences growing up and my complete lack of sense of self as a teenager, I feel that I might understand what M is going through at the moment.

The paradox is that I have no idea exactly what a sense of self is. But I know that it's the most important thing I've learned in my own life so far. Everyone's sense of self is completely different, so I would pretend to know the sense of self that my students need. But I know that education should be a way to help them strip down their protective identities (basketball player, tough guy, sexy girl, etc.), and help them get in touch with something deeper. And I can't say what deeper is, I just know it's there.

Once students allow themselves to appreciate themselves they will uncover a meaning in their lives. Talents and gifts begin to shine because they are not restricted by the superficial identities we have adopted in high school. I still role play to the identities I took on in high school, so I'm not claiming that education can rid us of them or that education should. Yeats wrote about masks, actually tons of writers have written about masks, and most of them agree that they are essential part of humanity; however, it is just as essential to understand what lies beneath such masks. Once students can discover their essence of their talents and gifts then the purpose of their lives will unfold--the place where or a way they can utilize*

*I got cut off and couldn't finish this, but I will.