Life Lessons

                There are life lessons I would try to impart with my high schools students when I had a classroom. Lessons like: go to college, don’t major in English or History unless you either absolutely love it or want to be a teacher, save your money, and don’t get into credit card debt. Teaching math is very challenging and very important, and opportunities to share these sorts of lessons don’t always come up naturally.

                I currently don’t have a high school class. I teach math at Lane Community College, where I would feel a bit odd sharing a lot of the above lessons to adults, many of whom are older than myself, and I substitute teach about twice a week. Tomorrow, if I get the opportunity I am going to share one of my favorite life lessons with my classes at South Eugene High School. I want to see what it’s like for a sub to do more than just hand out a worksheet and take attendance. When I had my own classroom, I had about 120ish students. What if I didn’t have to limit my personal ideals to just the 120ish students I had in a given year? What if I am able to reach more students while subbing? This is a new and exciting thought for me.

                I’ll give you the gist of the lesson, if you are curious (if not, you might as well go to some more entertaining website I suppose). It’s about the balance of freedom and responsibility in our lives. I feel that having more freedom requires one take more responsibility, which might be a new, possibly illogical thought for a 15-year-old, and when freedom and responsibility aren’t balanced there tend to be consequences.

hours-old Wyatt

                When we are born, we have absolutely no responsibilities, whatsoever. And when we are born, we have absolutely no freedom, either. We can’t do anything but cry. It’s a struggle to move our head, we can’t get food for ourselves unless a nipple is in reach, and we certainly can’t go anywhere. No responsibilities (sweet), no freedom (lame).

                When we are very young, we have very few responsibilities (clean your room, eat your vegetables) and just a bit more freedom (physically able to do simple things, freedom to play in most rooms of the house or designated parts of the neighborhood). A bit of responsibility and a bit of freedom, more or less in balance.

                The responsibilities and the freedom continue to grow together for a long time, and a few significant jumps occur. Maybe you get a car, or have your choice of classes in school (or a free period). When those freedoms start to occur, ideally responsibilities come with them. Get yourself to school on time, get a job to pay for gas, maintain a certain GPA or get into college. Still, this balance between freedom and responsibility remains.

                What happens to young men and women, from about age 15 to 25 (maybe 35 these days), in my opinion, is they will often try to keep increasing their freedoms without gaining the appropriate responsibilities. Get your car and go to parties or the beach. Get your free class and skip a few others. Go to college and go wild with experimentation. These actions, which are glamorized and encouraged throughout almost all media, can have consequences which rarely are mentioned. In 2008, the CDC stated that 1 in 4 American girls has an STD, and there are over a million abortions per year in the US, to cite two examples for women. For men, this pursuit of freedom without responsibility has led to less men in college (women outnumber them for the first time), men earning comparatively less than women and possessing fewer jobs than women ten years ago. (I compare men’s jobs to women’s jobs, because obviously men would make less and have fewer jobs now than 10 years ago due to recessions and high unemployment, but in that same time span women are still gaining.)

                I tell my students that I had had my most freedom when I had a full-time job and a full-time marriage: I had enough money to have a place to live, food to eat and a car to drive. When I wanted to go to the beach, I had a friend to go with and didn’t need to ask anyone. I can afford the video games I want and the food I like. They usually counter by saying “it seems like money is the key to freedom.” Well of course it is, at least in the ways I listed above, but you need a job to get money. At least, I did, and most of them do too.

Doesn't look like I've had much freedom lately, does it

                Now, here’s where my theory breaks down, and I used to tell my students this hypothetically, and now I can do it factually: Having a kid gives you much more responsibility and much less freedom. They no longer balance. That’s okay though, because I am happy with the other benefits and joys the new responsibility brings that aren’t freedom.

                So, we’ll see if I can spit this out tomorrow. I am subbing for a teacher I have already subbed for this year, so the students know me a bit. I expect to be mostly ignored or snickered at, but I am used to those things as a math teacher.