Care

I am posting a short piece I composed over three years ago in the fall of 2009. The summer before I had participated in a program called the Neptune Academy, which sought to provide exciting, stimulating summer education for local middle-school students. That fall, Doug Corbitt, Allison Wallace, Corey Womack, and I went to Washington D.C. to present on our experiences in the Neptune Academy. So I wrote a short essay on care.

I was deeply in love with Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber at the time, and I think you'll notice those strains here. Enjoy.

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People care, and people care that you care.  Young teens really do care about their futures, about their hobbies and interests, their studies, and they desperately want others—their parents, friends, teachers—to care about that care. As fundamentally social beings, we need, we crave this affirmation.  This sense of community is vital to our development.  Yet despite our individual cries for it, we ourselves often forget to dispense it to others. The teacher ignores the quiet whimpers of her student. The dad turns off his ears to turn on that night’s football game. The friend talks more of himself.

But in Honors, we remember the Other. We bow in humility before the Other and the possibilities we can have together. We give her the time of day because we recognize the sheer beauty of the Other—the fact that she sees the world in a completely different way, that she helps contribute to the whole process of the world, that she holds the special capacity to create, and that, if an honest person, she helps me to realize who I am and what I believe.

And so, in the Neptune Academy, we Young Professors actively engaged the students, letting them know that we cared, that we were genuinely interested in their concerns, that we wanted them to actualize their self-created possibilities, or first to dare to even dream of those possibilities. And boy, I saw the Other. Well, once I got past their OTD (Obsessive Texting Disorder), I saw these wonderful kids, who could be so terribly excited about life and what they found dear within it.  Eighth-graders bragging about what instruments they play, what disciplines they study, what professions they wish to pursue, how fast they can text.  And gosh, put them in the classroom!  Once their excessive energy wears off a bit when class starts, and they begin to actively participate in the discussion, they feed you, the teacher, diamonds.  I was utterly amazed at some of the profound insights these kids have, and at such a young age.  I personally handed them concepts and lessons that I wrestle with today, and that I know older people study, and yet these young students grabbed them and took off, and man, did they soar!  

Also, as an Honors student, I have seen.  Whether by experience or by the academic courage to face contentious or difficult issues, I have seen much of the world, at least more of it than a cloistered college kid who sticks to those classes that affirm his beliefs.  I guess you could say that my vision has been expanded.  Thus I take more in, and wow, I’m overwhelmed sometimes by this world’s magnificence, by its magic.  And yet my enlarged horizon carries much weight. I also see the frightening, the ugly, the unhealthy, the pathetic, the disheartening.  I can’t hide from it. I face it.  And I enter it.  And I wield my strongest weapon—the belief that I can make a difference, that my stupid, little actions actually affect the entire process of the world, and, I hope, for the health of all.

We must pass this vision on to our younger generations.  It is not an innate trait, biologically bestowed upon some by indifferent genes.  Rather, it is a capacity to be harnessed and cultivated, through education that mirrors the real world.  Not only did I want my Neptune Academy students to open their eyes and see, to stand in awe before it all, but also to stand in … fearful awe before it all, and to feel compelled to act.  I guess I wanted to pass on the Honors bug of being a “Global Citizen.” 

This Academy wasn’t all roses.  Hyper 8th-graders will drive sluggish college students crazy at times. Their attention can instantly make you focus on some random, irrelevant thing.  Cody, for instance, yelled “Microwave!” during Doug’s morning pep-talk about integrity, when he saw a college student carrying one down the hall.  Or these youngsters will blatantly tell you, during your lesson, that they are bored.  And they will ask you serious questions, from which you cannot run and which you cannot cover over with ready-made, trite comments.  They will ask you about God, about dating, and they might tell you disturbing secrets about themselves or their homes.

But we Neptune Academy professors held fast to our patience. What we saw in every one of our students was a light, a flicker of amazing possibility, and we gave them the tools to cultivate that light, to tend to it, to enlarge it. We showed that we cared. We introduced them to the excitement and wonder of education—not classroom education, but real-world education. We tried to open their eyes, to wake up, and I say that if we only did so with one, we succeeded.  I can only hope that one day, you, too, will feel that awesome joy and thankfulness that I felt, when I saw some of these kids “light up,” when they fed me diamonds, made daring comments or offered astute insights, when they discovered passions that they had never known until they met me and my fellow Young Professors.