Senior Superlatives

My boss at Yankee magazine, Jud Hale, had a standard reply to any disturbing news about contemporary life. ‘There’s another reason I’m glad I’m almost dead,’ he’d say.

I’ve had a couple of those moments at school recently. One came when a girl in my Freshman English class asked me how many minutes were left in the block. I gestured at the clock on the wall, which she was facing. She said, ‘I can’t read a clock like that.’

I’ve read elsewhere about this phenomenon, but it shook me to find it in my own classroom. It goes along with another oddity I’ve noticed: how few of my students wear wristwatches. If they need to know the time, they say, they just look on their cellphones.

Young people growing up in a digital world, I suppose, needn’t learn how to tell time by an analog clock. Still, there’s something that bugs me about it. Learning to tell the time used to be a watershed moment in a child’s life, like learning to tie one’s own shoes. An analog clock is an elegant metaphor, a model of the physical universe, with its three hands revolving at different speeds. It requires higher-order thinking skills.

At our staff holiday party last week, I found myself sitting with Bob Marshall, one of our most experienced teachers, a man whom I’ve admired for a long time. He taught all three of my own kids how to write a research paper so well that the task never daunted them in college. He said he’s deeply concerned about his students today, however. He worries that overexposure to TV and video games, and the corresponding decline in time spent reading, may be rewiring young brains, cutting their attention spans and inhibiting their capacity to think deeply. ‘Where are we going?’ he wondered.

One clue to where we may be going is the senior superlatives in our 2006 yearbook. Senior superlatives are, or used to be, honors bestowed on graduating seniors by their classmates to recognize outstanding talents or achievements: ‘Most Likely to Succeed,’ for example.  One young woman was very upset this year to have been designated ‘Class Kiss-Up.’ For those of you even closer to death than I, ‘kiss-up’ is a disdainful term for one who insincerely strives for the attention and regard of teachers. As my colleague Mike O’Leary has pointed out, calling this student a kiss-up insults not only the student, but all her teachers as well.

In this particular case, it’s not only hurtful, it’s utterly untrue. I’ve known this young woman, and the young man also designated a kiss-up, since their freshman years, and neither has ever been reluctant to disagree with a teacher. What makes them stand out is that they can express their disagreement graciously, respectfully, and with integrity. The thought of this outrageous slur being printed in their high school yearbooks fills me with dismay.

There are 30 categories in ConVal’s senior superlatives this year; perhaps ten of them honor genuine achievements. The other 20 applaud variations on what our 21st-century culture tells young people is admirable: celebrity (‘Most Likely to Appear on MTV’), possessions (‘Sweetest Ride’), appearance (‘Nicest Eyes’) and self-indulgent behavior (‘Class Partier’ and ‘Class Slacker’).

But before paging Dr. Kevorkian, I took a look at my mother-in-law’s high school yearbook, published exactly 80 years ago. There were 18 categories of senior superlatives in it, and many of them also dealt with appearance and social skills, rather than academic, artistic or athletic laurels.  It also contained insults like ‘Laziest,’ ‘Most Temperamental,’ and ‘Biggest Grind.’ So maybe things haven’t changed as much as I thought.

And there is an occasional star in the darkness. I got a pan of homemade fudge and a hand-made Christmas card from one of my freshmen the day before vacation, thanking me for teaching her ‘more than grammar and literary terms.’ In some people’s minds, I guess that would make her a kiss-up. I think she’s Most Likely to Succeed.