You Don't Get An Acceptance Letter to the School of Rock

Today on my Facebook feed, a friend posted about the acceptance letter her son had received from one of the colleges he applied to.  Lately, there’s a post about an acceptance letter every day, or a photo of an acceptance letter, or news of a scholarship. It’s fun to imagine my son’s friends, the children of my friends, embarking on their college careers, picking majors, making new friends, and discovering the joy of having your worldview challenged and changed by encounters with new ideas and new people.

                My son is a junior, so this is not the year for him to receive those letters.  Instead he’s been receiving glossy pamphlets and enticing come-ons from colleges, each promising wonderful opportunities for intellectual growth and doors flung open to marvelous careers.  There are pictures of beautiful young people walking on shady paths, or peering through microscopes, or reading picturesquely in the grass.  When they come, I just toss them in the recycling.  Sam doesn’t even look at them, and he won’t be one of those beautiful young students, because he’s not planning to go to college.

                This has been hard for me to accept.  I’ve taught at a small liberal arts college for my entire adult life, and I absolutely adored being a student in college and graduate school.   I loved every class I took except two, education and anthropology, one because the material was stupid, or seemed so to me at the time, and one because the teacher read his notes from an overhead projector.

How they made information boring in the olden days before Powerpoint.

For me, college was where I experienced the giddy joy of understanding the inner and outer worlds in new and deeper ways.  In college I began to wake up to the smallness of my life, and to the largeness of my responsibility as a citizen of the world.  It’s hard for me to imagine such a vital transformation happening without going to college.

                But Sam from a very young age resisted the idea that college was essential, and once he entered high school, the idea of purposely prolonging his time in school became deeply unappealing to him. I could write about the way his highly rigorous academic school has failed to meet his needs as a learner – and perhaps I will some day; but that’s really a pretty minor factor in Sam’s lack of interest in college.  It’s not really high school.  It’s him.

                He could go to college.  He tests extremely well.  He writes extremely well.  His grades are not bad, though not as good as they should be judging by his standardized test scores.  For a long time I have thought of him as an underachiever.  But that’s true only if I use his grades as the measure of achievement.  But to do that is to measure him by my experiences, passions and desires. His passion has never been for academic work, despite his capability, and measured according to his own priorities, he’s achieved plenty.

 He’s written so many songs since he was five years old that he can’t keep track of them all. He formed a band when he was in third grade that continues to play together.  He’s recorded an album and is planning a second.  He lines up gigs.  He arranges music and sings in three a capella groups.  He plays guitar in church.   Besides music, Sam’s priority is friendship, and Sam is a loyal and loving friend, a gentle soul who wants to make other people happy.  He’d rather skimp a little on homework and spend more time enjoying the company of other human beings.  He’s often said that the best thing he can imagine is writing a song that brings another person comfort and hope in a hard time. 

                He wants to devote himself to music when he’s done high school.  He wants time to make the band happen. He wants to get a job to earn money for the gear he needs to make the band happen.  He told me when he was twelve that he was going to be a rock star.  I sometimes think my job as a mother is to be the realist, the one who points out that hardly anybody gets to be a rock star and tells him he should have a back-up plan.  For several years I quietly insisted that he would be going to college, in spite of his almost total lack of interest.  You need a degree in case the music career doesn’t work out, I’d say, even though the greatest benefits I got from going to college had little to do with my career, and even though my post college career has not been at all lucrative. 

Early Days

                In fact, our family’s poor finances have given his decision to forgo college a certain practical appeal.  I have to admit to feeling some relief knowing we won’t be scrambling to pay the debilitating cost of tuition at even an “affordable” college.  Yet there is a little sting when I hear his friends discussing their college plans, when I hear other parents talking excitedly about their children’s academic achievements.  I imagine his high school graduation will have a strange anticlimactic feeling to it as he moves on not to the hallowed halls of a prestigious institution of higher learning, but to a low wage job and dreams of making it big.  I might feel embarrassed when I tell people what he’s doing, though I know I will also feel proud.  I still wonder, sometimes, if I should try to change his mind.

                But I’m done with that.  It’s not my job to say his dream isn’t realistic.  People can make a living in music, though often not a steady or regular income.  Some people even become rock stars.  And if rock stardom is not his destiny, he’ll learn that eventually, and discover some other path, a path that he chooses because it lights him up.  And who knows, that path may even, eventually, include college.  

You can check out Sam's music here: https://soundcloud.com/circusfiction/sets/the-maze