Early morning talk with my son about school. They had been given a choice in school about where they might set and stage a play, in this case, an adapted version of Antigone. I didn’t think much of his choice (more on that later), mostly because it seemed to be one emerging from social concerns, not any real understanding of the text.

Amidst childhood and parenting defensiveness, several things came up:

“I get good grades, so of course I understand. Leave me alone.”
Damn, son. Not you too. Trying to explain that grades don’t matter as much as achieving a deeper understanding is difficult. You can’t really say that you don’t care about grades (I do and he should too) but how do you explain that good grades without meaningful engagement do you no good. Most students in most schools would take an “A” with no real understanding as opposed to a “B” they truly earned after much struggle. That being said, my proudest moments in high school, college, and even graduate school didn’t correspond with the grades I earned.

“I wanted to do my own thing, not what the teacher said.”
I’ve been thinking about this lately, too. Any teacher knows the problem with giving an example, where you provide one approach and promptly receive 28 versions of your idea. But I also remember and feel the ways in which humans want to do creative thinking in their own way, in their own time, and in their own space. No novelist gathers a group of twenty people into a crowded institutional setting in order to write. I remember the feeling of once I get out of here (classroom, then school), I can get actually get something done. With most adolescents, but really human beings, the social stuff will trump all.

“Why do I have to know why I’m doing something?”
The fact that he asked the question warmed my heart even though it was accompanied by the adolescent death stare.