Musings of a 20-something

To be a 20-something is a terrible stage of post-adolescent, pre-adulthood limbo, stuck somewhere between an insecure reliance on your family and an assertive independence that requires little or no outside intervention. When you’re a child, adults seem to have everything together, everything under control. “Adult” is automatically anyone your parents’ age or older, and anyone still worth playing with is obviously a child. So, how do you categorize the people in between, the ones that aren’t really either?

We spend our whole childhood preparing for the moment when we graduate college and enter the world alone, ambitious and naïve, like a coming-of-age rite to prove we can make it alone. But, what we realize is that we are simply entering into 20-something-dom. In this vital stage of life, you realize you have no idea what you want to do or where you’re going, or even if you necessarily want to do or want to go anywhere. You start clinging tight to that childhood ignorance again and avoid real “adulthood’ at all costs, scared you’ll get trapped in an unavoidable corner – perhaps a corner office – you can’t escape from. In this stage of non-adulthood, you fake independence, knowing full well that the strings tying you to your former awkward teenage years have not been completely cut.

This thought brought about a strange epiphany a few weeks ago as I desperately attempted to quiet a classroom of arrogant, cooler-than-thou teenagers in my most difficult class. As I stood in front of them pleading for silence, it occurred to me that every time I walked into that classroom my body went stiff. The “kids” in front of me were really only about 5 or 6 years younger, something that had always made me a bit nervous since my presence didn’t command very much respect from that age group. It wasn’t very long ago that I was in their shoes, and their “I’m too cool for this class” attitude seemed to call me back to my own self-conscious high school years when kids like that made me feel the same way I did now; I would have never acted like them or necessarily enjoyed being around them, but I wanted them to accept me. Acceptance sparks confidence, and it became clear that I had never overcome that need for acceptance that I had always assigned to adolescence.

I had traveled half-way around the world by myself to teach high school English only to discover that I was the self-conscious one. It seemed an unfair twist of events that I wasn’t at all pleased with. I had done everything possible to retain patience, understanding, kindness, and love while in class with them, only to be met with consistent cynicism and criticism. And I let it BOTHER me because I wanted them to like me. I wanted them to like me so much that I was too afraid to discipline them for fear they would retaliate. I wanted them to think I was “cool” like the other English teachers and different from the Czech teachers that they always complained about. I wanted to be fun.

But, I was the teacher, and that’s what it boiled down to. It didn’t matter how old I was or where I was from, I deserved respect and deserved to be treated with respect as a person and as their teacher. A week after this realization, however, the situation got worse, and I confronted them about their behavior. A few of the more vocal students began verbally accosting me, saying they didn’t participate in class because they didn’t like being treated like children. They didn’t need to practice English, and they certainly didn’t need to participate in stupid games. Not prepared for such a caustic attack, I left the room crying.

Some of the students came to my office later to apologize for what had happened and to explain some things about their class. The ones that came told me that they DID appreciate the activities we did and that their attitude wasn’t necessarily aimed at me as a personal offense. Their group’s atmosphere was quite peculiar because the students themselves didn’t really get along very well. The ones that had so vocally accused me often made fun of other students and had inspired the rest of the class to adhere to a “too-cool” attitude in order to impress one another and avoid peer persecution. Even if they were having fun or wanted to learn, they certainly couldn’t show it in front of the rest of the class.

Suddenly it made sense to me. They were responding the same way that I was responding to them, except they were searching for peer acceptance while I was searching for theirs. But, I wasn’t in their role anymore. Through the course of time, the roles had been reversed, and they were looking to me for discipline, for guidance, and also for respect. I could respect them by giving them guidelines in class to teach them how people deserve to be treated. If I failed in that, then I would failed them… whether they knew that now or not.
I walked into the next class after the horrible incident and acted like nothing had happened. I was polite and treated them all like I had before, respectfully but with the appropriate distance; I smiled and had fun (even at the risk of further torment and several rolled eyes), but I knew when students were out of line and wouldn’t tolerate it; I tried to include everyone, even the ones that had hurt me last time, and I noticed that they seemed a little ashamed that day. Perhaps they were learning about peer pressure from the opposite perspective now, too - discovering that their classmates would stand up to them when they did something noticeably wrong.

I overcame a big obstacle that day that I had been avoiding for years, one that opened me up to being honest with myself about how I let others treat me in order to be accepted. I learned that its perfectly ok to defend myself and be who I am without pleasing everyone. That is a mark of true independence, and, somewhere in that 45 minute class, I became an adult.