Challenges for teachers are not hard to find in this day and age. That’s why, once the honeymoon is over, you must remember to execute! Fight through obstacles.

Does it happen to everyone in education that they lose touch at some point, like an athlete that doesn’t know when to hang it up, and they hold on for too long… to the detriment of those they have been hired to serve?

Thing about this issue though is that age, oftentimes, has very little to do with the matter of when someone should hang up their educational spurs. Truly, some people ought to take their chips off the table after but 3 months in this profession — and for a few, that’s 90 days too long in this field! Others need to stick around for another 2 decades even if they have already put in 35 years of service. (Let me tell ya, Boca Raton, Florida retirement with dinner served at 4:30 p.m. can wait.)

For a boxer, as the years roll on you lose hand speed. And you get punched in the head too many times and it becomes clear to even the most casual fans when a once-ferocious fighter simply needs to stay out of the ring.

Football players, baseball players, NBA superstars… Father Time and Mother Nature conspire to do ‘em in. As ticket buyers we see it and we let ‘em know.

But in schools, it’s not really the same. Like I said, some of the best folks we have in education are people who have been in this field for 30 years or more.

(If only they could NEVER retire.)

However, as I also said, some of people should have hung up their educational spurs when Nixon was president.

All in all, the big point is that time and age don’t necessarily translate to “excellence” in our profession. As too many of us well know, some of the best folks we have in our field have been in their jobs for less than 5 years.

And they are the ones who are first to get chopped when the budget cuts roll in.

Ouch! We butcher our most promising seedlings.

Yet, some folks in our field (no names — or organizations — mentioned) quite wrongly equate “years in the classroom” to “quality of work being done in the classroom” — as false premise as ever there was.

Age before beauty… it’s not right! And when common sense returns to public education — or finally rears its head, as some may argue — the idea that quantity of time in a class trumps quality of time in a class will be expeditiously bounced.

I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw right now and on page 305 he brings up a fascinating issue in regards to late bloomers.

Essentially, Gladwell speaks to the idea (I am paraphrasing) that recognizing the brilliance in painters like Picasso is a no brainer. They show their aptitude early and it is so evident that missing it is harder than identifying it.

However, identifying the brilliance of people such as Cezanne is another matter entirely.

As Gladwell says, “Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.”

And then he continues with what might be my favorite part of the entire book. Gladwell writes, “Let’s just be thankful that Cezanne didn’t have a guidance counselor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.)

It seems as though Cezanne was a classic late bloomer, a person who did not step into his own until he was much, much older. And of course Gladwell simply takes it for granted that our schools are just so terrible at recognizing late bloomers that the power of our own inability as educators has undoubtably tainted the lives of scores and scores and scores of kids.

Oh, not a whiz at the 5 paragraph persuasive essay by the age of 16? Nah, AP science classes couldn’t possibly be right for you. Why don’t you take oceanography for woodworkers instead?

I mean come on, isn’t that our mentality?

Gladwell continues…

“Whenever we find late bloomers, we can’t help but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents.”

How many F’s have our schools given to kids before they turned the age of 18 that have stained their own self-belief to the extent that they believe they were always doomed to be “F type students” for the rest of their lives.

How many Cezannes have we squashed? Or worse, how many more will we continue to squash until we find a way to validate the late bloomer?

I’d never heard of H.R. 1895 until very recently. Now that I have heard about it though, I wonder who in their right mind is not going to want to support this thing.

H.R. 1895 is also known as The Stand Up Act. Here’s what it’s all about:

The Safe Teen And Novice Driver Uniform Protection (STANDUP) Act would establish minimum standards for state graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws, which are proven to significantly reduce death and injury among young beginning drivers and those who share the road with them.

See vehicular accidents are the number one killer of teens in our country. Number one! And the fact is, teens are more likely to crash than any other demographic group of drivers. Like it’s not even close.

Matter of fact…

–Teen drivers ages 16 to 19 have a fatality rate four times the rate of drivers ages 25 to 69.
–Sixteen-year-old drivers have a crash rate three times more than 17-year-olds, 5 times greater than 18-year-olds, and two times that of 85-year-olds.
(These stats come from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — but I am also cribbing a bunch of info from the website they built to support this law.)

I could go on and on pounding the table with data, the horror stories of lives cut short, tales of my own students who passed away in car accidents (or of friends when I was in high school) but it would be superfluous. I mean, do any of us not fear for the safety of teens when they get in a car… especially when they get in the car with another teen driver, getting a ride home from a “party”?

Here is an overview of the STANDUP Act as taken from their website:

States must meet the following requirements under the STANDUP Act:

–Three stages of licensing – learner’s permit, intermediate stage, and full licensure – should be used
–Age 16 should be the earliest age for entry into the learner’s permit process
–Nighttime driving while unsupervised should be restricted during the learner’s permit and intermediate stages, until full licensure at age 18
–Driving while using communication devices (cell phone calls, texting) should be prohibited at least until full licensure at age 18
–Unrestricted, full licensure should occur no earlier than age 18
–Passengers should be restricted – no more than one non-familial passenger under age 21 unless a licensed driver over age 21 is in the vehicle – until full licensure at age 18

H.R. 1895: it’s the thing I never knew which I now know I want to support.

And as an English teacher, the connections to Tears of a Tiger are self-evident.

So everyone realizes that virtually every Human Resources person worth their salt at almost any decent-sized organization in this country checks the internet as a means of doing a background check on potential future employees, right? I mean this is something I talk about with my high schoolers. Putting pics of yourself doing beer bongs, smoking out of real bongs, taking off your clothes or being absolutely SMASHED out of you mind on the internet is a bad idea. (Note: I am not naive enough to pretend that my students don’t/will not “party” at some point — especially before they are of legal age to do so — so I warn them about this. However, if you want to debate the “I should be wagging my finger at these kids, not teaching them how to avoid paying the price if they should behave this way” aspect of things, that’s for a different blog post. This one here is zipping off in a different direction.)

And since the internet seems to have a better memory than even the most keen elephant, it’s more important than ever not to do stupid things when you are young that might jeopardize you future ability to be hired for a job even as much as a decade or two later after you have engaged in the stupidness.

Now trust me, I have done stupid things before. Lots of them. But (thankfully) they were before the age of digital cameras/ cell phones with video and YouTube/FaceBook/MySpace and so on. I mean even if those rumors are true about me and the mastodon in the taxidermist’s off back in 1987, there are NO photos to prove it. (And I am not saying they are true, BTW — it’s pure conjecture and there’s no proof!)

So essentially, it’s more important than ever for young folks to try and make sure they don’t do anything that is going to automatically show up as a “top hit” on google when a potential employer decides to do a little “unofficial online bg check” on ya.

And if I could think of one sure way to cause any future employers to NEVER EVER WANT TO DARE HIRE ME, it would probably be because they’d be scared that if they brought me on board, I’d end up getting them embroiled in an expensive, potentially calamitous, possibly frivolous lawsuit. I mean you just don’t want to be young and start looking for jobs in this day and age with the monkey of a, “WARNING: Hire me and I might sue you for absolutely no legitimate reason” sign on your back.

But that doesn’t seem to have stopped this young lady. Meet Trina Thompson, 27, a recent college graduate who is suing the college from which she just graduated because she can’t find a job and feels as if, in some way, it is the college’s fault.

Now I don’t know if Trina is gonna win or not — the college certainly seems to think these allegations are without merit — but doesn’t Trina realize that she just ID’d herself as a person who, if you do hire her, is one of those folks who might slip on a banana peel somewhere in your office and end up trying to bring down your entire business… even if she was the one who ate the original banana in the first place and failed to discard of it properly?

Trina, Trina, Trina, I am not sure what they taught you in college but you do seem to have one thing going for you: your sense of how the real world works appears woefully deficient. You just identified yourself as one of those “suer” types… and folks in HR work long hours not so much to find”great rock star employees” as much as to avoid hiring human train wrecks that are going to do real damage to their business.

And guess which category your top hit on google just put you in?