When our boys were in their elementary years, I came to be good friends with the first school teacher, the kindergarten teacher of our son Joe. Ms. McD. She was, and is, a treasure, and I volunteered in her classroom until she retired, and then I helped Ms. Suba, who taught first grade in the room next door. I would go in on Friday afternoons, when many youngsters and teachers are just about out of gas at the end of a long week of learning. Mostly, I was another set of hands, but I always brought some books, and if the schedule allowed, I would gather the kiddos in a circle, and we’d have a read-aloud

A favorite first-grade picture book was That’s Good! That’s Bad! In the story, a boy goes to the zoo with his family, and a balloon carries him off. He encounters one challenge after another, and the reader’s assumptions about his situation are challenged again and again. The vine is not a vine but a snake (that’s bad... no, that’s good). He loses his grip and lands on the back of a giraffe (that’s good... no, that’s bad... because the giraffe leans over for a drink and the boy lands in quicksand). You get the idea. Little people loved guessing and exclaiming the “that’s good / that’s bad” turn of phrase.

So it goes in the lives of grown-up people – we look at a person and his /her situation, circumstances, experience, or happening and make assumptions. This is particularly the case with communication that comes to us on our phones or laptops, which is mediated by persons or algorithms behind the curtain, much of which is meant to get our attention (that either affirms or enrages us). Sigh.

I work in one of Pocatello’s high schools. That statement alone could lead a reader to make a number of assumptions. For example: high school students are entitled and lazy (nope); public school employees are not doing their jobs (nope); that public schools do not prepare students for their next steps, works, careers, the future (untrue); that public schools and public school employees harbor some vile plot to undermine the cultural values a student comes from and identifies with (again, and emphatically, not true).

The goal here is to challenge two major assumptions.

First, there are the assumptions made about me. I am a woman of a certain age (which you know from the photo here). I work in the public schools and am probably the oldest employee in the building – old enough to be the principal’s mother and to be grandmother (or great grandmother) to most of the students. No matter. Age and professional constraints regarding age are a social construct (and, by the way, age discrimination in the workplace is, sadly, common). The median age of U.S. Supreme Court members is 70 or 71; the median age of senators in the U.S. Congress is 64, and, according to the Pew Research Center, the Senate of the 119th Congress is the oldest in U.S. history. Our president is 79; he will be 80 in June. Is age a deterrent to important and meaningful work? Absolutely not.

Because my hair is gray and I am obviously a Baby Boomer, some folks assume that I am incapable, technologically inept, easy to offend, inflexible, and unable to adapt and pivot as life demands. During my eight years in this job, I have experienced a global pandemic, a parade of different co-workers, and a terrible building fire three years ago this month. We have worn masks, worked in temporary quarters, made do with much less actual school space, and had politics insert itself into our work. No one can say that we are not (that I am not) flexible or that we lack a can-do attitude. Public education students and staff share the same goal: that we are all rowing in the same direction toward student success.

The second assumption is about high school students. It’s like kicking the dog – easy to demean and diminish today’s youth. Here’s what I know about today’s high school students. They work hard. They are serious about academics. They are committed to their families in whatever form they take. They seek and work for the strengthening and improvement of their communities. We have a tradition in the spring called Senior Celebration, at which we honor and recognize all the seniors and the great variety of paths they will take after graduation. When we ask them who has worked a job for wages during high school, something like 90 percent of them stand up. Which means they have worked at school, worked at a job, and often devoted considerable time to involvements that are important to them, like theater, speech and debate, sports, and service.

Just think about the world that our young people have experienced. Today’s high schoolers were in elementary school when COVID emerged. We cannot discount its impact on their education and their social development. Are today’s kiddos on their phones a lot? Yes, but – let’s not be hypocritical here – so are adults. If today’s students are anxious, we can easily point to social media as the bogeyman (and that’s fair), but we can also appreciate that they are dealing with stress we could not have imagined in our school years. Adults today want students to KNOW where they are headed for a career (I am a college career advisor and I don’t know what my career goal is), to achieve and succeed at their extra-curriculars, but also work a job and pay for their own car insurance (ouch), have acceptable friends, good manners, a cheerful disposition, and, of course, strong grades. They wonder how artificial intelligence will affect their job prospects and career aspirations and fret about whether they will ever be able to afford a house. Yikes. All this in a world that is uncertain, tenuous, and at times fairly terrifying. Now I’m anxious.

But the students I work with are resilient; they are doing the most incredible things and are very impressive. Our students are state championship speech and debaters, storied athletes, whip smart (we have a class of high schoolers taking Calc II! Calc II!?!), they are devoting two years to church service in very challenging places, they are crucial family members who put young siblings on the bus or prep dinner at night or care for the elderly or infirm among them, they have jobs all over our community (we would not have food or food service without them), they have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships for training and college, and they are both fun and funny. I am a better person, and certainly a better employee, for my time with high school students.

Appearance is a head trick. You look at someone and – this is human, I get it – make assumptions because of what you see: age, race or ethnicity, general health, their clothes and manners. That’s bad. Today I am asking you to stop, wait a beat, and let your assumptions go. You may be pleasantly surprised. That’s good.

This is not a book review column, but here are a couple of suggestions from my recent reading. Many years ago, I read Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain, her memoir of growing up on a sheep station in the Australian outback and going off, after great challenge and loss, to college. For our genre book club at school, I listened to the book again on a long drive to north Idaho. Amazing how much you can forget in fifteen or twenty years. Conway writes vividly of the landscape, her family, her drive to learn and be educated. So good and, as a bonus, it is the first of three memoirs she wrote about her life course. By some accident or good luck, I checked Ali Smith’s Gliff out of the library. Set in the near future, the novel follows a couple of siblings in a world that is Kafka-esque and dystopian, but don’t let that discourage you. It is absolutely brilliant and was released in paperback on May 5th. Happy reading.