Hatful of Hope

Lance’s first name is Devin. Lance’s middle name is Jackson. As far as I know, Lance’s parents had no intention of ever calling him Lance, but that’s the name he prefers to go by, so that’s what we call him. I’m not sure what’s so special about that name, why he’d rather use it than either Devin or Jackson. I guess it’s all a bit arbitrary really. I mean all things considered, the names Lance and Devin are relatively similar—same amount of letters, both fairly common but not too common, both of Anglo-Saxon etymology (I think). I can see no advantage—or any drawback—to using either name. I wish I could say that it didn’t matter to me, that I haven’t lost sleep brooding over it. I wish I could say that I’ve long since stopped trying to figure out the quirky motivations of teenagers. But it would be a lie.

Truth is I spend a great deal of my time trying to figure out this bizarre group of near-humans. I find that I am enthralled with them. I observe them—always with the scientist’s aloof objectivity or the birdwatcher’s eager gaze. My goal is two-fold: to discover their true nature and simply to marvel at the weird wonder of it all. One of the main reasons I’ve started this blog is to see if I could set down an accurate portrayal of today’s American teenager. The movies are wrong. They either make them too simple or too complicated, but they’re both, and neither. Stereotypes are useless and, consequently, so is attempting to flip those stereotypes. On Tuesday the star quarterback might be seen modestly yapping it up with the third-chair tuba player, and then on Friday, he’ll be the picture of detached coolness. The burnout slacker might be seen studying for a test because his Algebra teacher also likes The Grateful Dead. The mousy little art girl with the swooping bangs and hand-made jewelry might be seen yelling her rodent head off at a basketball game because the goal of getting the ball in the basket always seemed to her like a poignant metaphor for love. My point is it’s nearly impossible to pin down anything close to an accurate definition of what a teenager is. The best I can do is recount these various anecdotes and hope the empirical evidence speaks for itself.

Which brings us back to Lance. Lance would not fit well into any theatrical attempt at teenage life. The kid is a walking contradiction. He comes from a poorly educated, working class family, but he’s quite intelligent when he wants to be; he’s a veritable fountain of disparaging remarks, but he’s surprisingly understanding and tolerant of other students in the classroom; he’s a large kid, but he’s graceful in a way. He has a name that he doesn’t use. If I were writing the next Hollywood high school blockbuster, I would cast Lance’s character as an overweight bumbling redneck fool of a kid who gets wasted on cheap beer on the weekends and laces all his dialogue with vilifying comments about homosexuals, women, minorities, Democrats, little people, skinny people, and anybody else that wasn’t like him. And I would be about 90 percent accurate. But it’s the remaining 10 percent I’m interested in. That’s what the movies leave out because it confuses viewers. I can’t really blame the screenwriters; I wouldn’t want moviegoers to experience the same befuddlement I’m forced to live with everyday. However, the part of me that craves truth would like to see, just once, a movie that paints an accurate picture of a kid like Lance—10 percent and all. So for those of you who don’t spend half your waking life around teenagers, this is for you. Prepare yourselves to be baffled.

Lance loves America. When we are led in the pledge to the flag each morning (ironically, it’s by a British woman), he is the only one who ever follows along. There are days, however, when Lance prefaces the pledge of allegiance with the announcement that he will not be joining in that day because America is being overrun by liberals. So we all stare silently at the flag and listen to the foreign inflections of the familiar refrain. On one such occasion, Lance proclaimed to the class that, instead of pledging his allegiance to America, that day he would be pledging his allegiance to Puerto Rico. Sure enough, as soon as the intercom speaker began reverberating with the strains of patriotism, Lance joined in with his strains of sarcastic dissent. “I pledge allegiance to Puerto Rico and…” (mumbling, searching for something clever to add) “…and to Communism…” (more mumbling) “…and…to Castro…” I should have been the one to stop him here, but I was too entertained. Luckily the student next to him retorted, “That’s Cuba, you idiot!” I shot a glance in their direction to make sure that Lance’s feelings weren’t hurt or that they weren’t about to start some territorial dispute, but Lance wore his self-satisfied grin all through the Texas pledge and the minute of silence, his point having obviously been made. And I’m not so sure he didn’t know exactly what he was doing.

A couple of weeks ago, Lance wanted to talk politics, and since we had some time to burn that day and because it was the morning of the primary elections, I allowed it. Lance wasted no time in blurting out, “I don’t like Obama.” (For sixteen-year-olds, this is talking politics.) I applauded Lance for achieving the first step in rhetoric: stating his position. And then I told him what he needed to do was defend his position.

“Why don’t you like Obama?”

Knowing Lance’s proclivity for racism, I grimaced a little while waiting for his reply. And I exchanged concerned glances with the mulatto student at the back of the room—sort of a preemptive apology for what was certain to follow. His response, however, caught us off-guard.

“Because all he does is talk about hope.”

I was stumped. I’ve always considered hope to be a pretty damn good thing, and I assume that other people feel the same way. I knew I should have just let it go at that, but my curiosity was piqued. Remember, my ultimate goal is to try to discover what makes kids like Lance tick. Plus, I was pretty sure I could make him look like a fool.

“So are you supporting the despair candidate, Lance?”

Unphased: “No. I just don’t see the point in hope. What can it do? Nothing. What can you do with it? Nothing.” And taking off his cap for effect: “I could fill my hat with hope, and it wouldn’t change a thing. It would still be a hat. I could throw it on the ground and stomp on it. And then where would your precious hope be?”

Again I was stumped, but this time it was for a different reason. It was because I knew I had been beaten. (In my defense, it wasn’t really a fair fight because when Lance said he wanted to talk politics, he really meant he wanted to talk philosophy. I was equipped with the wrong weaponry: I came wielding a crowbar, but what I needed were brass knuckles.) At any rate, Lance was right. What good is hope? And why had I assumed it was a good thing? After all, it was at the bottom of Pandora’s box of evil. Hope might be nothing more than our futile and pretentious attempt at playing God, at dodging the inevitability of fate, at rearranging the very structure of the universe.

The problem, however, was not my misconception of hope. It was my assumption, but not my assumptions on hope. My mistake was assuming that all of Lance was contained in that aforementioned 90 percent. We all know the tired adage of what assuming will do to us. And if you need proof of its validity, then just go hang out with a teenager for a few minutes. Not only does Lance pass along backdoor axioms with the deftness of Yoda, the kid can also write a story like you wouldn’t believe. He may not have the most agile tongue, but give the boy a pen and paper and he will break your heart. He probably has more raw talent than any other student in my class. And if that’s not enough to confuse your preconceived notions of high school archetypes, Lance was voted homecoming prince by his classmates this year. You should have seen him down there on the 40-yard line with all the pretty kids. It was beautiful.

We recently started reading The Great Gatsby. Two pages in, Fitzgerald dispenses a major theme of the novel when he has his narrator state that "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." There are numerous cliches that express this exact sentiment: don't judge a book by its cover, beauty is only skin deep, all that glitters is not gold. Maybe Lance's refusal to accept his given name is his way of expressing this sentiment. By choosing a new name for himself he is refusing to be typecast into his expected role. He's saying he won't allow others to pigeonhole him. He's sloughing off the dead and useless skin of our expectations. Or maybe he just likes the name Lance.

In Memoriam M.L.K.

On the first day of each virgin class year, I have my students read a portion of the thirteenth chapter of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It’s a fairly challenging excerpt in which Steinbeck bemoans the destruction of the individual at the hands of the collective mass. He tells of his fear of the future—a future where mass method becomes our way of thinking until we “have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.” It’s a frighteningly accurate prophecy that Steinbeck sets forth, but maybe it's just because humanity has been constantly moving in that direction since we were mere dust and ribs. Or maybe it’s just the tired strains of an artist championing the individual. Or maybe it’s the defiant decree of the punk-rock rebellion screaming “Damn the Man!” Whatever the reason, it’s a pathos that sixteen-year-olds can get behind. They understand, almost innately, the inundation of the mass upon their individuality. After all, at sixteen what have you got besides yourself? So we talk about this threat to their individuality and try to come up with some strategies to defend against it. For a while the discussion seems hopeless. I mean, what can any one of us do to escape the oncoming tidal wave of the mass and prevent our single voice from being swallowed up and drowned out?

Prior to reading the Steinbeck passage and planning our strategies for survival, I have the students write their name on a note card. As class progresses I have them add other various personal information that is fun for me to know—things like favorite color, extracurricular interests, and post-high school aspirations. When they are writing their names on their cards, I tell them it’s the most important thing they will do all day. Because they’ve only known me for about five minutes at this point, they don’t know whether or not to take that statement seriously, and most snicker a bit. But I am serious, gravely serious, deathly serious. I ask them why writing their name might be a matter of utmost importance, and at first, they’re stumped. So we talk about what a name means and what it does, and eventually they begin giving the answers I want: our name represents who we are and what we’re about, it connects us to our forebears, and it distinguishes us from one another. They begin to see a little of what I mean when I say that names are important. I, of course, take this opportunity to tell them that names in literature are doubly important. At this time I also impart to them the single most important piece of advice I give them all year: “If you don’t do anything else this entire year, don’t forget your name!”

Again they snicker. Because at this point they haven’t discovered the full impact of this advice. It’s not until after we've read and discussed Steinbeck, until after we've recognized our wretched condition and have gotten to the point where we have to save our damn-ready souls, and I ask, “Okay, so what do we do to escape the oncoming tidal wave of the mass and prevent our single voice from being swallowed up and drowned out?” And then I wait for it. And eventually the synapses fire and one of them remembers the silly bit of advice, and he or she says, “I know how to save my wretched and damn-ready soul. I remember my name.” I smile in gratitude and say, “Yes.”

This isn’t about the first day of school, however. It merely serves as a preface for what comes next. (And you’ll have to excuse any heavy-handed sentimentality that follows. It’s sometimes difficult to write with detached objectivity.) Nearly seven months have passed since that first innocent day, and things have changed, although I suppose they’ve basically stayed the same. Students have been crammed full of nearly seven months-worth of information they likely mostly will never use, except for when they take the state’s standardized test, which they’re doing now while I’m writing this instead of actively monitoring. We’ve had a successful athletic year: The football team won the state championship; other students have done well in the various arenas of academia. They’ve played video games and read books, made music and made love; they’ve gotten drunk, gotten high, gotten free; some have found God, some have lost Him; some have gotten smarter, others think they have; they’ve made good decisions and they’ve made bad decisions—in short, they’ve been teenagers.

And three nights ago we lost one of them in an automobile accident. Her name was Megan. (At least that’s what we’ll call her here.) She was driving home from work after having picked up some Easter candy for her family. The truck coming the opposite direction veered into her lane, the driver having temporarily lost control for some reason that will remain unknown, and Megan never had a chance to react. A head-on impact. She was tall and thin, she had straight blonde hair, and she was a good kid. She was quiet, a wallflower type, except when she was with her several close friends.

I had her in one of those classes that never seems to shut up. The last class of the day, when I’m getting tired and they’re just getting started. Megan was a remote oasis in a desert of noise. At times when I was particularly annoyed or frustrated with the unceasing drone of mindless prattle, Megan and I could exchange the furtive smirk of our shared empathy. Because of her demure nature, Megan advanced relatively unnoticed through her social stratum. Many students didn’t even recognize her name when we heard the news Monday morning. Our culture has a way of attributing value to people in accordance with how much noise they produce. But I’m reminded of a line from Whitman’s “Great are the Myths” that advises us to “forget not that Silence is also expression.” If this is the case, then Megan expressed more than most.

On the last test we took, about a week ago now, Megan forgot to put her name on her scantron portion of the test. It’s always a little frustrating when students forget to put their names on assignments, but exceedingly more frustrating on scantrons, especially when two or more forget. It’s virtually impossible to distinguish one student’s bubbles from the next. So when I noticed Megan’s nameless scantron, I was slightly annoyed, and when I showed it to her the next day, I can’t deny that there wasn’t a certain tinge of disgust in my voice. It may be that nameless assignments and tests bother me on a metaphorical level. Part of me sees it as reckless disregard for my first-day advice. Of course, I never miss the opportunity to remind students of this, so in my best pseudo-patronizing teacher voice, I asked Megan if she still remembered her name. She flashed me her sheepish grin and nodded yes. And after writing her name on her scantron, she shuffled out of the classroom. That was the last time I saw her; three days later she was gone.

I’m not sure I know what I believe happens after we die. Tunnels and lights and St. Peter at the gate and all that. Do we play harps and sing and ride on clouds? Do we scrape the caked and crackling earth-dust from between our toes and belly buttons? Do we return to Eden? Do we become what we'd always hoped for? Do we finally incarnate the individuality we strove so hard to attain? Or do we melt into each other like drops into some transcendent pool of the over-soul? If we could talk to Megan, she could tell us. But she’s busy conquering space and time. I only hope that during her journey from here to there, while the pall and shroud were stretched and the cosmos blurred in her rear-view mirror, while the steel and stone yielded to blood and bone, while her mother was pulling in the slack of her umbilical cord and her father peered ahead into the listless night, I hope she didn’t forget who she was and what she was about. I hope she didn’t forget her name. If she did, I will remember it for her.