Strength, Determination, Reliability, Integrity, Courage, those characteristics, the biblical connection to the gospels of St. John and St. Mark, and the existing statues in Tower Grove Park inspired Vianney's 1st principal, Bro. Ken Nesbit to select the mythical creature as the school's mascot back in 1960.
These characteristics identify the qualities that define the best version of the men our students strive to become. And while all honorable, and necessary, and valid, I cannot help but think sometimes about what NEW characteristic I would add to the existing traits.
What word can encompass what we hope our students will eventually become?
The quality that I would suggest is as important as any other a Vianney Griffin could display: vulnerability.
I frequently hear parents say, “He’s a teenage boy, so he doesn’t tell me anything.” I’ll allow that, for many boys, this unwillingness to share details with adults – and parents in particular -- is an appropriate step in their burgeoning independence. They want to manage their own affairs, and high school offers them an opportunity to begin to test their self-reliance.
Too often, though, boys confuse communication with dependence. They want to solve their own anxieties and disappointments, and they clutch victories in private, lest they appear in need of external validation. They fear being judged as weak by asking for assistance from teachers or judged as inadequate by verbalizing their emotions to peers.
What some boys fail to see is that vulnerability underpins so many of those attributes they aspire to develop and that we hope the Griffin, and ultimately, they will possess.
A recent report by Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley titled “For Whom the Boy Toils: The Primacy of Relationship in Learning” (2013) affirms the long-held view that a young man's learning is enhanced when he enjoys strong bonds with his instructors, coaches, and mentors.
Our own anecdotal data tells us that those students most ready to achieve scholastic success at the high school and college level view their teachers as allies rather than as adversaries, but that perspective comes from trust, and that trust comes from one’s willingness to be vulnerable.
In her 2010 TED talk on vulnerability, Dr. Brené Brown describes her own process of wanting to throttle all manner of weakness within herself, analyze it, figure it out, and then cast it aside. In essence, she conveys an adolescent boy’s approach to vulnerability: resist it and conquer it by force and sheer will. She later acknowledges, though, the futility of such an approach: “In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.”
We know that our young men benefit greatly from the relationships they build while at Vianney; the friends they make during their four years here will be their friends for the next 40 years and help them celebrate birthdays, marriages, babies, and career and personal milestones!
Yet our task is to convince them to make the most of these relationships by showing their teachers and their peers who they really are, even if that identity is continually evolving. Vulnerability enhances connection, connection enhances learning, and learning enhances development.
Young men most readily see the power of vulnerability in the athletic arena, as sacrifice and faith in one’s teammates are cornerstones of a team’s success. Yet they need to embrace this vulnerability just as much, if not more, outside of the lines of play.
Students must remember that those moments when a fellow student stands in Mass to share a personal reflection, at Kairos to discuss a struggle he has overcome, or in the offering of intentions during a class prayer are the ones that ennoble us as a community.
Those brave young men allow themselves to be seen – in ways large and small – and they deserve not just our support but our courage to do the same as we develop them into
Vulnerability may be the first step in building community.
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