The Best Is Yet to Come

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I have a couple of grandchildren who will likely be graduating from high school this spring. It’s been a rocky road for both of them—school moving online and back to in-person as the COVID-19 numbers rise and fall. Families with several children holed up at home juggling computer time while they squint at screens for ZOOM classwork. It hasn’t been easy for students or their parents. But as a long-time high school teacher, I always had a few seniors every year who got word they’d passed their last minute make-up classes as they lined up in cap and gowns with their classmates, hoping there was good news before the processional started.

Sometimes in the stress and chaos of getting those recalcitrant students across the finish line, we adults forget that though students may walk and talk like they’re grown-up, they’re still kids—peering over the threshold of maturity with a good deal of suspicion and unease. (As someone who has claimed to be an adult for several decades, I’m with those wary students: think carefully before you leap!)

A couple of years after I retired, I got a call from a mom I hadn’t heard from in years. Her son was getting married. He wanted to invite me to the wedding.

“Me?” I said in some surprise. I remembered her son well. Our classroom relationship had sometimes been strained, to say the least. I liked his mom. She cared. We’d talked often about the problems her son was having in my Honors English class. He was a good-looking boy–bright and articulate, but he was also unfocused, disorganized, and pretty lazy. And he suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder. He claimed to have done assignments he “forgot to turn in”. He wasn’t interested in class discussions, and he had barely managed to pass every quarter.

By 4^th quarter of the year, his mom was at her wit’s end. Together we had worked all year on strategies to support her son. She spent hours every week at the kitchen table with him trying to get him to focus and to care about learning. He ignored her. It was boring, and he had better things to do. At least once, his mom was reduced to tears when she called me for help. Neither she nor I could convince her son to engage in his own education.

So, surprise was a mild reaction when she called me out of the blue. When he son had left my classroom at the end of the year, it was with obvious relief on both our parts. Now he wanted to invite me to his wedding?

“Yes,” she said. “It’s really important to him that you come.”

I was reluctant, but his mom was stellar; she’d had enough disappointment involved in her experiences with me. She gave me the date and address, and I agreed to be there.

The wedding was a small event at the home of a family friend. The groom was resplendent in a full dress Marine uniform, sharp red strips down his dark pants, black jacket with gold buttons and a raft of medals across his chest, a white cap tilted on his forehead, and a sword handing from his belt. His bride was several months pregnant in an elegant little black dress. Their eyes never left one another as the ceremony proceeded.

After the wedding there were refreshments and relaxed, cheerful chatter among the guests. I knew no one other than the groom and his parents. As the crowd dispersed, my former student motioned me over to meet his bride and tell me his story.

He’d managed to graduate from high school by the skin of his mother’s teeth, but college sounded like more annoying homework to him, so he bumped aimlessly through a couple of jobs. At some point, he saw a Marine poster, and it fired his imagination. That’s what he wanted. Something that mattered.

He admitted to having no idea what he’d gotten into. It was tough. Really tough. Eventually he qualified as a medic and served in combat in the Middle East, earning some serious military awards along the way. When he came home, he met a girl at a little church outside the base where he was stationed in the Midwest. Now they were starting a family.

He told me that he invited me to the wedding because he remembered the many hours his mom and I spent trying to figure out how to keep him in school long enough to graduate. He wanted me to know that our time had not been wasted.

Most teachers don’t get to see the adults their students become. At the end of the year, kids walk out the door and disappear into the future. It’s easy for all of us (including parents) to forget that high school graduation is never the end of the story. It’s just the beginning. If we find the faith to give the students we care so much about a little more time for maturity, in almost every case, the best is yet to come.