Everybody, Always

school just felt kind of over to him. He had most of what he needed to get
into college, and the last year felt like a punishingly slow victory lap.
One evening close to the start of the school year, I asked to see
Adam’s class list. He went up to his room and was there for a long time.
When he came back downstairs to the kitchen table where I was sitting,
he stared at his feet as he reluctantly handed it over. I looked at the list
from top to bottom and laughed. “Where are the classes?” He tried to
hold back a grin but didn’t do a very good job.
His class list was ridiculous. I don’t remember exactly, but I think he
was the hall monitor for one period, cleaned erasers for another, had an
art class, and was working in the school office the rest of the day. This
was the schedule of a guy with his feet up on the handlebars and his
fingers woven together behind his head.
Sure, I was sympathetic. Adam was beyond bored with school.
Nothing really lit him up anymore. I remember the same thing happening
to me in high school. Rather than coming down on Adam about his class
list, we put our heads together and came up with a plan. What he needed
was a challenge big enough to hold his attention for the year.
I had him sign up for a few real classes, and we got rid of all the other
time fillers. For his senior year, Adam would leave school at noon each
day and head to the airport to get his pilot’s license. Instead of coasting
through his last year of high school, he would ride it out at cruising
altitude.
Sweet Maria thought Adam flying an airplane every day was a terrible
idea, particularly when she heard he would be flying it alone after only a
couple of weeks of lessons. I told Adam to think of his after-school
program as a pass/fail class. You crash, you fail.
Adam would come home every day and tell us about what he learned.
He would describe the cockpit and the preflight checklists. His
vocabulary was peppered with new terms like pitch and yaw. He was
insistent about telling us the process for buckling the seatbelt in the
airplane. I think he did this to show his mom he was taking his lessons