Lilliam Rivera's 'The Education of Margot Sanchez'

Rivera’s The Education of Margot Sanchez provided for me a painful, though necessary, reminder of my teen years. Now, how does that help me as a teacher-in-training? How does this novel apply to all the new educational hoops I have to jump through to get certified?

You would think the answer ‘duh, I’ll be teaching teenagers’ would pop up on the fore-front of my brain like a bright, searing neon sign. Actually, no.

I’ve chosen to work my way into teaching teenagers; so why does The Education of Margot Sanchez make me feel uncomfortable? It’s a novel about teenagers, written to be read by teenagers, and read by a woman (me, myself, and I) who was once a teenager. This should be easy beans for yours truly.

But then I realized: oh no, I’m slowly morphing into an adult that deliberately doesn’t think back to many memories I have as a teen because, for lack of a better way to say it, I don’t want to remember my teenage self.

I didn’t want to remember the awkwardness, the angst, the pining to have the approval and attention of peers that I actually didn’t care about, and who certainly didn’t give a flying leap about me. I didn’t want to remind myself that I put myself through a lot of unnecessary (it seemed necessary at the time) pressure to be admired and haven’t always appealed to the rationale of not caring who approves of me so long as I approve of me.

This novel had the power to embarrass me because I felt a metric ton of second-hand embarrassment for the character Margot, and then topped it off with the mortifying realization that: wow, I used to be just like her- clueless, miserable, stronger than I ever realized. I want to hide in my ‘adult’ persona as often as I can, but that won’t help me one bit with a classroom full of teenagers, looking to me to be sympathetic/empathetic with them. Despite my cringing, I want them to realize that at one time in my life, I was just like them. I wasn’t a special snowflake that did everything perfectly. I was learning how to be myself, like Margot- like them.

- Angela H.