soaring to meet reality

I was meeting with a new student today. She'd made the appointment to discuss doing a series of assessments to "find out what I'm good at because I don't even know who I am anymore". She's 19. Are you supposed to know who you are at 19?

It's so distressing, the students I see, the pressure they feel to figure it all out, to know everything, NOW. While other cultures are slowing down, embracing gap years, encouraging students to take time off in between or during schooling we're doing the opposite. Students finish high school at an earlier age, enter the workforce or university sooner and are charged much more for the latter than at any point in history. The first question at any Toronto social event is invariably "What do you do?" or, for students, "What do you want to do?". Not necessarily a bad question but it's the expectation behind it, that they should know what they want to do that stings. There's no room for playful curiosity, for trying something new, for failing, for exploration and for having fun with it all.

This same student kept talking about things she'd dreamed of doing, being an actress in particular, but always followed her dreams with the statement "But I have to be realistic" and a repeated request to do the tests so she could find out what she's good at. As if the tests could know her better than she did.

How did she come to decide that it wasn't her dreams that she was good at? How did she become so lost to herself that she thinks the answer lies in 317 multiple choice questions? How has she come to believe that "being realistic" means letting go of your dreams, defeated? What are we doing to our kids?

Many times when I'm working with students my heart breaks for them but, more often than that, I'm so glad to have the job that I do. A job where I get to present an alternate point of view and introduce the possibility that "being realistic" isn't something you fall down to - it's something you soar up towards.