I was listening to The Ezra Klein Show, an episode from July 2021 with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Coates was answering a question about why he was looking forward to teaching in a classroom again when he could be doing something — anything — else. “They keep my mind young,” he replied. The response resonated with me — a teacher and non-famous writer who, for all the work it requires, finds teaching to be far more a source of energy than a drain.
The sensation I know also comes after my early-morning pick-up basketball game. A gym’s bright lights offer clarity at 6 a.m. I am creaky and fuzzy-brained but I play, improvising with whatever familiar group of players I find, and afterwards, drinking water, driving to school, eating a pastry the size of my head, I feel more limber than I did when I woke up at 5:20. Tired as my body feels, I have no need to sink Lebowski-like into a bubble bath; I have more energy and enthusiasm for the day of teaching.
And the day of teaching — the improvisation, the exchanges with students, the planning — that keeps me limber as well. Coates is right, and not just because students, witty and weird, yearning and goofy, remind me of what it feels like to be on the brink of adulthood as opposed to squeezed in its bellows. They stay the same age and I get older but I need not grow stale, professionally-speaking. Even if I teach the exact same texts every year (which I don’t), I can always make things new. That can mean dragging an epic profile of Kevin Durant (a guy who definitely gets how authenticity and uncertainty work) into my unit on The Stranger or coming up with a new project to capitalize on the specific interests and talents of students in a given year. The palimpsest of old plans and calendars gets scratched over in a graffiti spray of ink until the paper physically disintegrates. The extra work does not burden me; it provides sustenance, an antidote to the aging process, even when I wilt at 9:30 p.m.
When I heard Coates say that, I was also thinking, man, that’s how I want the students to feel too! Not a state of perpetual immaturity but a keen self-awareness that their minds are young and should be malleable, that the world can hurl things at them — slings, arrows, whatever analogy you like — and that they can be ready to react with adaptability, creativity, and confidence. And that they can be flexible with themselves too, open to their possibilities. I want students’ minds to be limber, ready, even after they’ve stayed up to the witching hour in pursuit of some bloody vengeance in an online game, even when they insist that what they are doing has nothing to do with what they will be doing once they graduate.
See, the problem is that, for all their youth, many high school students are not inherently limber. Class is a system to game, a code to crack — not unlike that beautifully rendered battlefield where they vanquish their friends’ avatars in combat. They want a destination and a path. An academic experience is valuable if it translates directly to future earnings in a desired field. Work is either a waste of time or an essential piece of a pipeline they think they’re digging between high school and the career they imagine having in five or ten years. That’s not every kid, of course, just a lot of them.
For their first major writing assignment of this school year, a bunch of seniors wrote that their education was not preparing them for these envisioned careers. This isn’t necessarily an unfair critique, though it’s probably less about the subjects themselves than how they are taught. The argument they articulate often amounts to: I want to work with computers; why should I have to read novels and discuss themes and characters?
I often tell students that they may never read another novel again and yet be happy until death, that they may also never again write a document longer than a paragraph and still earn enough money to buy a home and support a family. The link between the work of school and its benefit need not be concrete; the relationship doesn’t have to be transactional. It’s cool if a kid knows he’s going to trade school to become a plumber, but what if he became a plumber who read? Or if the young mechanic was comfortable speaking in public? Or if the carpenter could write?
The skills do concretely link to more money, opportunity, and power. You write a clear proposal; you get the contract. You are articulate and charming when you speak with clients; you get more business; you can be a community leader, influential and compelling. Maybe you file some of the benefits under “life skills” to bolster other tangible concerns. Students can accept that reading comprehension lets you catch sneaky clauses in contracts, and that you’re less easily fooled. An administrator I knew, a guy who moonlighted as a real estate agent, would tell students that a familiarity with The Great Gatsby once helped him close a deal on a house, and that they could never know how a class as seemingly useless as English might benefit them in a way that mattered. Ironic! Too bad the administrator didn't get it. But what’s the worst-case scenario for you, a high school kid who reads literature when the future feedbag of your imagination depends solely on STEM? A little humanistic balance? A familiarity with themes and stories and characters to grant more empathy for others? More sensitivity, consideration, confidence, and bravery in dealings with people? Knowing how to talk to those you want to be attracted to you? Dwelling at least part-time in the world of ideas, beauty, and feelings? What a waste.
Why are 17-year-olds so eager to hurl their hearts into the thresher? It’s not as if many of the naysayers stand out for their mule-like ethic. Why is work, the exchange of labor for pay, the reason to bother learning? Many students already do work, a lot of it mindless, plenty of them clocking hours for families desperately needing their minimum wage earnings. Last year, during the building closure portion of the pandemic, sensing inaccurately that class time was optional, a few students took on full-time jobs at the expense of school, comforted by the larger checks, happy they could control something in a world gone haywire. One important lesson for all students funneled through public education though should be that life is not work. Both may reflect passions, expertise, and effort, but, if my unit on The Stranger does its job, students will graduate understanding they get to define their life’s purpose any way they wish, not by the parameters of a job description.
This brings me to Of Mice and Men, which I’m currently reading with ninth graders. Lennie is the perfect cog in the brutal economy of his Depression-crushed times: compliant, strong, energetic, and incapable of knowing or even caring when he’s abused. A savvy worker of the era shows up for work at the end of a shift, not the beginning; he takes solace in extra grub and the best prostitution deals in a nearby town (Whit’s extolling of the virtues of Ole Susy’s reads like an ancient Yelp review). Steinbeck gives us models for quiet resistance to the grind. Whitey, the old employee who grimly excised the nasty parts of his potatoes and worried about lice infestation, preferred a higher quality of life than ranch society would accommodate for a mere bucker of barley or shoer of horses. Bill, another former bunkhouse resident, liked reading and didn’t stick around to discover his favorite magazine had published his short but sincere letter to celebrate the work of a beloved writer. A published critic — who’d have thought? And until things go sideways, from the Salinas River campout that starts the book to his conversations with his new bordello-addicted brethren, George separates himself (and Lennie) from the masses — because they have a dream, a desire to live differently, to make work have a meaning beyond the money they receive in exchange for fluffing up the profit margins of a wretched backwater capitalist with an impotent heir. They crave an island of love and sustainability in the Depression hellscape, a vision that includes personal days off, hearty meals, comfortable quarters, pettable creatures, and feet warmed by a stove.
Work is simply not enough. It’s logical to lead students towards a conversation about the predatory gig economy or Amazon, how the promise of a self-determined schedule or a modestly high entry-level wage might seem, for a time at least, to compensate for intrusions, degradations, and insults of a more existential sort until the grotesquerie overwhelms. I think of a former student who drove for DoorDash and would get bad reviews and no tips for failing to ferry a few sandwiches from one side of San Francisco to the other fast enough. What would Meursault say about that? Probably nothing. He’d park somewhere quiet, roll down the window, let the mist float in, light a cigarette, stare up at Twin Peaks, and sip his coffee. Last year, a senior had to take a week off to help care for her mother, an employee at an Amazon fulfillment center who’d been placed on something called “time out” after being hospitalized for pregnancy complications. Imagine being the mother of a teenager and a soon-to-be-newborn and being categorized as a wayward child for missing a few days of work to avoid dying.
And it’s not just jobs like these. I can tell students about friends who’ve worn themselves down at white-shoe law firms, in research labs, as teachers. It might not be migrant farming, but a graduate degree doesn’t mean you can’t be exploited. I love roping my old charter school into this, because, union-less, bound by a contract allowing for immediate termination at any time, teachers there really had to take anything (that “duties as needed” clause, folks): Saturday tutoring, detention monitoring, lunchtime test prep, whatever scheme happened to ping-pong around The Founder’s frantic brain and pop from his mouth. Lesser administrators, the manager class, followed his lead. I watched teachers get unceremoniously canned, walking out holding boxes of their shit while an administrator “escorted” them from a “respectful” distance. It was a shameful theft of dignity, an undermining of every surviving teacher’s stature to let students see and know the thin thread to which we had to cling. The kids used to joke about who would be fired next. We teachers did too! A few months after I started in 2011, observing an extremely “safe” lesson on The Glass Menagerie (his favorite play), The Founder sang my praises — because I was teaching the thing he, never an English teacher, had installed on the curriculum — and said: “You know, I have to say, I wasn’t so sure about you until now.”
At the start of my Of Mice and Men unit, I poll my students, the young cogs-to-be, about their definition of “the good life,” hoping to have them see parallels between their concept and that of George and Lennie, Depression-era strivers. They have to pick four “ingredients” from a long list (like “marriage,” “a home you own,” “an expensive car,” “free time,” “a six-figure salary,” and so on) and also identify several behaviors (like “working hard”), actions (like “finishing college”), and circumstances (like “inherited wealth”) likely to benefit them. I also have them administer the same survey to grown-ups in their homes. The results are fascinating: in segregated Marin County, at a school made up of 65% Latino students, these mostly concentrated in one dense neighborhood on the edge of town, lawyers, therapists, marketing executives, house-cleaners, carpenters, and landscapers weigh in — a portrait of the community. They prize ownership, health, careers, good deeds, and money. They have faith in effort and determination, like the kids in my classes, and they’re similarly cautiously optimistic about one’s chances for success, although they focus more on needs than wants. The 14-year-olds are much more likely to fixate on lucrative employment and luxury than the grown-ups, who, when pressed, gravitate towards self-sufficiency and responsibility. Health feels more important to 50-year-olds. Teens think about friendships more than marriage and kids, travel and cars more than stability and peace.
But essentially, they’re pretty close, the 14-year-olds and the adults invested in their success.
Two weeks ago, I asked students to reflect on their “recipe” and compare it with what George rhapsodizes over. I was struck — stunned, really — by many of their literal, dull takes. I don’t want to have a farm, I want to be a programmer, wrote one kid. I want to travel a lot and be very wealthy, not live with a friend in the country, wrote another, adding, I don’t like dirt. The point was not just to make a direct comparison. The point was seeing which values feel timeless and which seem outdated or particular to the time. Maybe owning a home in the Bay Area is the new “fatta the lan’” if you think about it. Maybe the young professionals they envision joining are “rolling up a stake” at a tech company. Maybe living with one large animal-loving friend isn’t a dream but the prospect of companionship and camaraderie still provides comfort. Spend time with teenagers and you’ll find they crave support, autonomy, and love. They understand the appeal of what no one can take away. Some students could dive into this conversation, noting, for example, that freedom is an enduring desire; another postulated that a sense of purpose is more valuable than any tangible outcome. But many of them really struggled far less with examining the text than with examining themselves.
Despite often being mildly-to-moderately listless in their presentation, teenagers think hard work is really important. They say you have to work hard. They say they want to work hard. I know there’s a class divide, one that often follows racial lines: many privileged kids have been inundated with the idea that they’re supposed to work hard so they can keep having nice things; many kids from low-income families have watched their parents work hard and been told it’s the only way to survive.
By the time they graduate, I hope they also see the power of a reflective life, a limber, searching existence. Time offers a profound privilege, the space to read and think; the ability to meaningfully make it yours is a superpower. I like to think that’s a little timeless part of what George is aching for. It’s not just about working hard without The Boss sneering down from his horse. It’s not just about getting a day off here and there. It’s not about the thick cream and the stove and the visits from mates and the rain playing the roof like a piano. It’s about what you do with time, what you get to think about as you warm your feet on that day off and sink your hand into a dog’s fur and make another pot of coffee. A limber mind, a luxury known to manic educators and The Dude alike. That’s worth a struggle toward the heights.
I think you are one of the greatest artists at drawing inknown