Tulgey Wood

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 6^th 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.