I did what I was supposed to do: I cared about school. I
cultivated my grades like prize orchids.
I worked hard, played light.
I didn’t party. I did my
homework. I once wrote an
unassigned essay because I had something to say about A Separate Peace and my teacher had neglected to provide an
outlet. I participated in
extracurriculuars. I got into a
top tier liberal arts school and majored in a STEM subject. I got a
job in my field after graduation.
I was set. I was
ready. I was on the path to medical
school, to the prestigious career as a world-famous, life-saving surgeon.
But I was lost.
I hated my research job. I
was miserable. The MCAT never took
itself. I discovered that while I
desperately wanted to be a surgeon, I didn’t actually want to become a
doctor. And that realization left
me nowhere. I had decided to
become a neurosurgeon in the sixth grade.
My entire identity had been built on that foundation. “Hi, I’m Emily. I’m going to be a brain surgeon when I
grow up.” If I didn’t want to be a
doctor, I didn’t know who I was. I
loved science but hated doing it.
But doing science was all I was qualified to do. When you have a B.A. in biology, you
can go into research, go to graduate school, or go to medical school. These are the acceptable, respectable
choices. I said no to all
three.
In an attempt to reconnect with my curious, creative, and
intellectually insatiable sixth grader, I applied for a job at my childhood
Mecca: the Carnegie Science Center.
It was there that I discovered what I wanted to do with my life. One day, a five year old boy asked me
how our blood gets around our bodies.
“Are there tubes?” he wanted to know. I bent back my wrist and showed him my veins. I showed him his. I told him that there are, in fact,
tubes. He stared at his wrist and
then looked up at me, the embodiment of pure wonder. “I can see inside my body!” he said.
I wanted to teach science.
In a way, my sixth grade self was still right: I do want to be a surgeon. I
still wish I could cut it (pardon the pun). But my inability to become a surgeon is not an intellectual
handicap; it is a spiritual one. I cannot become a surgeon because life as a
surgeon would not make me happy.
It would fulfill my childhood dream, but it would make my adult self
miserable. Being a surgeon would
not be, as Sir Robinson put it, an expression of my most authentic self. Getting up in front of a classroom
every day with a license to talk and geek out and gush about science…that is
the expression of my most authentic self.
And I didn’t find it in school.
I didn’t find it by doing what I was supposed to do. I found it by giving up, by throwing in
the towel, by admitting defeat. I
found it by moving home and taking a $9/hour job.
I am lucky enough that, while the path I laid at twelve left
me in Alice’s Wonderland forest of confusion, I loved every minute of school
along the way. I loved organic
chemistry, for Christ’s sake. My
education served me well. It
fulfilled me. And I came full circle: I rediscovered the passion I found in my
6th grade science class, the passion I mistook for ambition.
What must it be like for kids who hate school, who find
nothing there that excites or ignites them? What about kids who are good with
their hands, who want to be artists, or hermits, or aid workers, or firemen, or
taxi drivers, or flight attendants, or moms, or dads, or any other vocation
that isn’t valued by our rat race obsessed society? What about the kids who
don’t know what they want to do, but who
know that a decade of school hasn’t come close to helping them figure it out?
It should be noted that my secondary education was at an
independent school, one of the best in the city. I was given freedom, encouragement, stimulation. My teachers fostered my love of dance
as assiduously as my love of science. Great credit should be given, in equal
measure, to the teachers who encouraged my brain-surgeon dream and to those who
encouraged me to consider the possibility of something else. At 18, I couldn’t imagine wanting
anything other than a life in the OR.
But every time I saw my old history teacher, he respectfully asked me if
I had changed my mind yet. He saw
something I didn’t.
I truly cannot imagine my life if I had attended public
school. I think that even I, a kid
with “potential,” would have been lost in the shuffle. My history teacher wouldn’t have seen
that something in a class of thirty students. And if I had found myself in the
same dark woods after college, I doubt I would have been equipped to find my
way back to myself.
Sir Robinson reminds us that we literally cannot envision the
world in which our students will live.
And yet we are expected to teach them. How?
By teaching them to think. By fostering the skills
necessary for successful adulthood, rather than a successful career: decency, responsibility, humility,
respect, resiliency, creativity, problem solving, persistence, compassion. Good
grammar and an ability to evaluate information. The willingness to make mistakes. The ability to admit that you’re wrong or that you need
help. The courage to question authority.
The reverence of both your own inner voice and trusted, expert
advice. The gumption to figure it
out for yourself. Because in the
end, we won’t be there with them.
They’ll be on their own.
And a fat lot of good a bunch of forgotten facts will do them.
