Tag Archives: back to school

The week before school started, I was chatting online with one of my coaching students. I asked how he was feeling about going back to school.

Even before I finished the question, he began shaking his head.

” Not so much?” I said.

He paused. ” I guess all I can do is try my best.”

I felt more than a little troubled by the note of defeat in his voice. This young man doesn’t struggle academically, so I wondered what else might be at the root of his back to school blues. Maybe I’ll hear in the weeks to come, and maybe not.

For some teens, returning to the classroom is an uncomfortable time, going beyond the usual loss of summer freedom. If there’s a shift in schools, as there is for many new grade 10 students, they face the prospect of getting lost, literally and figuratively, in an unfamiliar building among unfamiliar faces. Maybe they worry about fulfilling academic expectations – their parents’ or their teachers’. Maybe they fear seeing that instructor’s name popping up on their schedule. Maybe they’re concerned about fitting in to a new or existing friendship group. In singer Michelle Wright’s words, “Sometimes high school feels like a minefield/just trying to get through the day.”

During Edmonton’s Fringe Theatre Festival this year, I learned a new term that I plan to share with my students when they tell me their concerns about navigating the high school minefield. In a musical memoir entitled Brave-ish, Sarah Dowling, an Edmonton actor, singer and playwright, credits female country singers of the 1990s – Michelle Wright, Trisha Yearwood, Shania Twain, Faith Hill – with giving her the courage to establish and hold onto her essential self during high school in the tiny Alberta town of Thorsby. It wasn’t easy. Eventually, though, she left Alberta to attend musical theater school in Toronto, found a job she loved as a cruise ship performer, and married the love of her life, assuming she’d live happily ever after.

But adult life brought more challenges than she was expecting – the decision to move back to Edmonton to be closer to family, to have her first child, and find sustainable work clashed with the carefree life she and her husband had in their 20s. Resolving the conflicts, she said, required her not so much to be brave but “brave-ish,” taking small steps towards big goals.

If you’re the parent of a teen who’s hesitant about taking that first step towards a new school year, it might help to brainstorm with them how they can be braveish about whatever is causing their anxiety. Maybe they can smile and say hello to a student in one of their classes who looks as lost as they feel. Maybe they can have a first week chat with that teacher to see how they can succeed in their class. Maybe they can find out the drama club’s first meeting date. While being brave might seem like too big a request, braveish means taking that first small step towards addressing a worry or accomplishing a goal.

As for me, the next time one of my coaching students approaches me with how to start an essay or understand a complex novel or figure out their English teacher’s expectations, I’ll encourage them to be braveish as we figure out a plan together.