Open a New Window; Open a New Door

I feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel good (doodle ooo doodle ooo).

Sing it like James Brown.

It's amazing when the cloud lifts: the cloud of the stomach flu and the cloud of being a woman.

Seriously. By Wednesday I felt so much better; I was joking around with kids again, I could put two brain cells together and check papers, and I wasn't having "the chills" every 30 minutes.

Ok. Enough about me. Now that I feel better perhaps I can blog about other things....like how we STILL aren't done with the damn yearbook from last year....like how proud I am of Ranae for being a university photographer and getting paid for it....and how I'm noticing a Freshman Fatigue happening in almost all of my students who go off to college.

My former students are having a hard time transitioning from being big whigs to being nobodies, I think. The American High School is structured so seniors rule: they work hard for 3 years so they can have open campus privileges, they work hard so they excel in athletics and activities and they get rewarded for every thing they do.

Then, enter college life: moving into a big unfriendly dorm with thousands of other students, starting the academic career in big lectures with no personal contact from professors, and all the while trying to figure out who the hell they are. No wonder they freak out; some from the work load and some from not making friends as fast as they'd like and some from partying too much or too little.

I can't remember which musical it's from, but i do remember singing this line over and over one summer when I was teaching Upward Bound: Open a new window, open a new door....travel a new highway that's never been traveled before! (editors note: a simple google search shows this is from the musical Mame.)

But in traveling those new highways, we leave behind our security. In order to open new windows we have to close old ones, and aye, there's the rub. I wish my former students didn't have to cross those thresholds....those life thresholds that make us more mature but zap the kid out of us concurrently.

Alas, that's the rich tapestry of life....going from being sick to being well and going from being dependent to independent. I just wish the journey didn't have to be so painful.