The Changing Role of Adolescent-hood

As you may remember from last week, I've been on vacation in Hilton Head. And I should note that I'm tan. Very tan. Yay!

I'm home now, and just in time, as the island is currently under mandatory evacuation due to Hurricane Hanna. (I hope my cousin Natalie left last night after work rather than get stuck in potentially up to 8 hours of standstill traffic leaving the island...trust me, it sucks...been there, done that.)

Anyway, I got to spend some quality time with the relatives on my mom's side this past week (I've got some of them in the picture at the top of the post...from left to right: my grandmother; my cousin Lauren, who is studying for the MCATs at the moment because she takes them a week from tomorrow; me; my Aunt Bobbie). It's always a treat to see them, especially my grandmother.

My grandmother, who we call Gaga, will be 90 in May. She was born in NYC, and grew up in Spanish Harlem, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants. Gaga was the oldest of 5 children, so when she graduated from high school at age 15 at the height of the Great Depression in 1934, she couldn't afford to attend college, despite her fervent desire to go. So off to work she went, to help her mother and stepfather (her father had passed when she was younger) provide for her younger brothers and sister.

Yes, age 15. At an age when most teens today are going to Homecoming dances and football games, my grandmother was out in the working world and essentially raising a family (albeit her siblings) because her parents worked long, long hours and money was extremely tight. She sacrificed her own teen years so that her siblings teen years would be a little better.

She married my grandfather, her high school sweetheart (a neighborhood boy...son of Puerto Rican immigrants), at age 19. Had she followed her dreams and gone to college straight out of high school (remember, she graduated really young), she would have graduated by then, but that wasn't in the cards.

But she never gave up her dream of pursuing higher education. After raising five children, Gaga started commuting into the City to attend Hunter College when my Uncle Dick was in college, my mom was in high school, my Aunt Cookie and Uncle Peter were in junior high, and my Aunt Bobbie in elementary school. She majored in Spanish and French, and then got her teaching certificate.

So in the 1960s, more than 30 years after she graduated high school and started working, Gaga became a high school Spanish teacher. She retired in the early 80s (I remember going to the Spanish class Christmas party when I was 3 or 4 and getting to take a whack at the pinata), but to this day, continues to help tutor students in Spanish.

My grandma, whose teen years were not conventional by today's standards, taught me the importance of education and achieving your dreams, no matter what the odds. She's my hero.

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Zero Tolerance Makes Zero Sense

When I was a student at Marshfield High (my stay there was not chronologically identical to those of my classmates, but I was there) I ended up in in-house suspension on my birthday. In-house was was more or less a cross between jail and silent study. Teachers rotated through the day. You had to be escorted to the bathroom, just outside the classroom, and escorted back inside. It was long and boring.

But this was my birthday and my then-boyfriend (heya Timmy!! 'sup, man?) came to the window on one of the cooler teacher's shifts and asked if he could purleeeeaze give me a gift. (Timmy had traveled all the way from Duxbury, one town over, and was probably skipping school, since he went to Archbishop Williams, several towns north.) Teach relented; Timmy passed me a small box; I opened it to find a Hostess Cupcake with a candle and file in it.

Ok, it was a nail file. But the Jimmy Cagney movie (Google it, kids) reference was cute.

Teacher told us, point blank, that he was not amused and that he had a very low tolerance for nonsense.

Today he would be a paragon of patience, I guess. Because across the country school systems are adopting the ridiculous policy of "No Tolerance." That means, as most of us know, that if you break one of the big rules you're out, no questions, no second chances.

Really? This is a policy schools adopt? Errr... and brag about?

I was a teacher for a while, too. Personally, I think tolerance was among the most important lessons I had to deliver, even though the subjects assigned to me by the administration were English, Psychology, and Journalism. I even had a kid in one of my classes who had been moved from AP English to a lower level with many of the Special Ed and remedial kids. When I asked why, I was told it was punishment for bad behavior.

Yeah. I almost wigged, too. My last act before leaving was making sure he went back where he belonged the following year. Academic punishment for behavioral problems? (By the way, I never had a lick of trouble from him.)

Anyway, back to Zero Tolerance.

I find it fascinating that schools these days want to stick their noses into the private lives of their students-- perusing MySpace pages, alerting police to parties, telling them how to dress and wear their hair-- but have the nerve to institute a policy that completely cripples the ability of young adults to learn the skills they need to make those choices wisely for themselves.

Tolerance and acceptance and understanding work together. Tolerance allows us to bend and change so that we can make it to acceptance and growth. Tolerance is the magic bullet that lets a kid raised by racists learn to deal with people who scare him, then learn to let the fear go, then learn to reject the stupidity ingrained in him or her by others. Tolerance is the mechanism through which a Catholic kid works side by side with a Muslim kid without getting into religious arguments. It's not important that they disagree; they tolerate (and hopefully, after a lot of tolerance, embrace) one another.

Kids need tolerance. All of us do. A school system without it is a system crippled, mangled, and harmful.

And I can promise you there won't be any file-stuffed cupcakes! So what's the point, really?