In the Zone

It may be one of television’s most recognizable intros. If the spinning top or the surrealistic images fading in and out didn’t get your attention, the unmistakable voice of the narrator certainly did. Rod Serling’s sonorous invocations drew us into his weekly sci-fi, psycho-drama anthology series which once captivated so many of us. With a nod to his creative flair I offer for your consideration this adaptation of his opening narration. Feel free to supply the soundtrack, an always certain ticket back to your favorite TV perch on a 1960s Friday night.

There is a dimension beyond that which grownups dare enter. It is a dimension as vast as a child’s curiosity and timeless as youthful imagination. It is the middle ground between insight and insecurity, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of our fears and the summit of our knowledge. This is the dimension of growing up. That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, the School Zone.

The School Zone? Why not, especially now that so many of us are in the twilight of our own prime time run.  I’m sure each of us has a very personal and highly charged sense of what school has meant in our lives. Since our student experience lasted from eight to twelve years, from nursery and elementary through intermediate, middle and high schools—not to mention weeks, months, years or decades in college--we carry a wealth of feelings and opinions about its meaning and value. Even more important are the indelible memories we collected along the way: our classes, activities, honors, embarrassments and, most of all, that cast of characters whose lives intersected with ours during this formative time of our lives. This company of acquaintances, most separated by years or miles, and more, each year, by death, includes dear friends, dreaded enemies, beloved and intimidating teachers, coaches and counselors. Lurking in the shadows of those memories may even be the faces, possibly even the names, of office, cafeteria and custodial staff, and an occasional Principal or his/her Vice with whom we may have endured a lecture, suffered a punishment or received a commendation.

It is no surprise that these recollections remain so accessible to our thoughts. For we have been engaged in school anywhere from 20% of our conscious existence to two or three times that amount as parents and grandparents of school-aged kids. And for those of us who liked it so much that we chose to pursue careers in education, our days in The School Zone might even have exceeded 80% of all the days we’ve been blessed with life and breath, ears to hear, eyes to behold and hearts to be challenged, inspired and broken.   

I’m certain that our days in The School Zone have been among the very best, and the very worst of our times. At the distance that decades provide, and as separated as most of us are by jobs, families, and the mobilities of this era, we may now be inclined to look back upon school with fondness and appreciation. Others of us—a minority I hope—-only harbor the enduring ache of having been fish-out-of-water in schools in which they never sensed they belonged. In spite of any unsavory recollections of school that may yet fester, it appears that most of us regard our various scholastic matres as being places in which we did, in fact, find alma* sufficient to help us grow and mature. Why else do we treasure those opportunities to rejoin alums in homecomings and class reunions. Such moments allow us to step back into those memories, those relationships and those feelings of belonging and identity that once defined who we were. The School Zone was a powerful place in which we once lived, and over time its hold on how we came to see ourselves, look at others, and make sense of the world around us has been more influential and determinative than we may want to admit or recognize.

Why would I say that? In the School Zone children tug and pull, stretch and loosen the umbilical bungee that transforms them from parental clone to autonomous self-creator. It is never a complete break or reinvention, its moments of rebellion often followed by cathartic reconciliations. Over time kids learn—or are stigmatized in their failure to do so—-how to find their way through those clashing rocks where self-interest is buffeted by the interests and ambitions of their peers, their teachers and their parents. It is a passage fraught with challenges and trials in which the resiliency and adaptability they will need as grownups is forged. Most make it, but some remain forever stuck in a limbo of dependency, keeping them bound in subservience to authoritarian companions or cult heroes.

In The School Zone grown ups discover what may be their single most important duty to the human race—the raising of children who will not only succeed them, but advance the best of their values and achievements. For parents this means stepping aside as others take the lead in influencing their children’s ideas, vocabularies, aptitudes and values, even while they faithfully support them when they stumble and when they excel. For teachers this entails bringing the very best of their knowledge, their organization, their creativity and their compassion to this ministry** of empowering and enabling. For those responsible for the macro functions of school administration, school requires of them both the wisdom to prudently prioritize in managing budgets, facilities, people and schedules, and the commitment to creating learning environments where students and teachers are both respected and protected. The School Zone works best when the investment of time, effort, excellence and love is shared by each of its residents, from the youngest pre-schoolers to the oldest seniors; from the most seasoned educators to those rookies facing their first classes; from parents now following their last of several children to those tearfully dropping off their first or only on the first day of school.

Given the magnitude of how many Americans will soon be returning to The School Zone, the following numbers are worth pondering. During the next nine to eleven months, straddling the better part of two calendar years…

·      more than 130,930 buildings and campuses across the land will receive an abundance of blocks—some largely uncarved and others scarred—which we gladly claim as our children, all arriving with an array of talents, energies, and agendas that will both inspire and vex the very best that their faculties will be able to muster in working with them;

·      more than 55 million students will participate in the daily rituals of walking, riding buses, navigating car lines, toting backpacks stuffed with high and low tech tools designed to make them smarter and better equipped to survive in the 21st century world;

·      more than three million teachers, three-quarters of them female, will once again shoulder what may be our most sacred trust—the development and well-being of our children—and do so at salaries well below what most self-respecting attorneys, doctors, business owners and managers, politicians and professional athletes would ever accept; 

·      over 100,000 school administrators will wade through that mine field of hazards posed by entitled students, helicopter parents, opportunistic lawyers, and possible armed assailants, all the while trying to make all of their charges feel special and affirmed—in spite of having to labor under austere budgets, suffocating regulations and the often delusional expectations of school boards, parents and over-the-top sports boosters.

Looking at what the adults who populate The School Zone contend with every day, it is no wonder why so many are leaving the teaching profession. What they once entered as a vocational calling too often resembles something concocted in Serling’s imaginings of the bizarre and macabre. If schools were once conceived as places of light, hope and promise, they now just as likely cast shadows of suspicion, doubt and even death upon those who enter their doors.  Too often fraught with terrors and unbelievable twists and turns that defy what once stood for common sense and normalcy, schools today are becoming battlegrounds through which only the most courageous, idealistic, or cynical seem willing to travel very long.

When Alice Cooper proclaimed in 1972 that school was out, not only for summer, but forever, his high octane anthem may have been more prescient than any of us could have then imagined. Perhaps it signaled how much America had lost its way in the preceding decade of war, racial discontent, presidential assassination, drug explosion and sexual revolution. But as it turned out, school and what it represented weren’t, in fact, “blown to pieces.” For school, like everything else in our world, has had to transition from what it once was to what it has become. And through those changes—some good and some passing fancies—-what has remained, and what continues to thrive, is the eagerness that most children bring to the adventure of their own learning and growth. What also has endured is the commitment that teachers continue to bring to helping young people discover how to make of their talents and interests something fulfilling to themselves and meaningful to the world they will soon be helping to direct.

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*Alma is Latin for “nourishment”, which when pared with mater means nourishing mother, symbolically linked to those institutions in which we were educated.

**Ministry defined as service to others has a long etymological history, and teaching more than aptly qualifies as a ministerial vocation.