I teach in Cape Elizabeth. I wasn’t horrified or even surprised to learn that there were parents in my district trying to give their kids a leg up on acing exams in high school (“Cape Elizabeth parents shared old tests, principal says,” Jan. 13). I was sad.

I grew up in a community in Massachusetts not too different from Cape Elizabeth in terms of socioeconomic status and community pressure to make the right choices about college. However, I had parents who gave me a different message, through their lived examples, about happiness and fulfillment.

My parents were lucky and privileged to have jobs that they loved and through which they found meaning. It didn’t matter where they went to college or how high their test scores were. They achieved what they achieved in their lives through creativity, fostering connection with others, building community and thinking outside the box.

In spite of their example, it wasn’t a lesson I was always able to hear, and especially not when I was 17 and going through the college process. The other voices, the ones that told me to define myself and my success by college acceptance and SAT scores, were louder.

I’ve been a middle school teacher for 20 years. One of the many things I love about middle school is the way that adolescents are living, sometimes agonizingly, in the moment. Project due next week? That’s light years away. Homework assignment due tomorrow? They’ll find time for it later.

One of our jobs as middle school teachers is to start to scaffold those executive functioning skills for our students. We create all kinds of systems to show them that planning and forethought are important. How do we do this without creating anxiety and stress? How do we prevent this emphasis on planning and forethought from turning into a monster in high school, where everything suddenly “counts” and to some parents and students it seems like a good idea to go to unusual and ethically questionable lengths to be prepared for the next year’s exams and assignments?

One of the saddest parts about these parents scavenging for the answers to last year’s tests is not just what it says about the pressure to achieve a certain type of success, but also what it says about how we view our education system. The richest learning experiences are meaningful, not in the ways they prepare us for what comes next, but in the way our understanding is transformed so that we experience our world with more color, detail and nuance than we did before.

I wish I had answers, but I don’t. However, I can point to a school program in Cape and elsewhere in Maine that encourages students to pursue internships and personal interest projects related to their goals in and outside the classroom. Students who participate in the Extended Learning Opportunity Program have written plays, interned in law firms and hospitals, created websites, written music and started businesses.

What I like most about this program is that it meets students where they are now, and shows them multiple pathways to and examples of success. There are so many ways to live a happy and fulfilled life with or without a four-year degree from a prestigious university. I think most families in Cape Elizabeth understand and support this — it has certainly been my experience that the majority of them do.

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