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“Do We Deserve Our Teenagers” Rob Schebel
My story about teenagers begins with a tale of two phone calls. Now, remember, any accurate depiction of young adult life is necessarily going to involve a phone, most probably a cell-phone. If you see a teen out in public without a cell-phone in hand or stuck to his ear, something is probably desperately wrong. What cars were to the teens depicted in the movie American Graffiti, cell-phones are to today’s young people. I think someone could probably write an interesting book on the ramifications of that one distinction alone.
Anyway, back to the tale of two phone calls. As most folks know, I’m an English teacher at Valley High School, and it happens that both phone calls involve former students of mine calling me late at night. Even though my number is unlisted and I don’t give it out…well, kids have a way of finding it. Probably on the internet. They can’t find good information for their research projects on Anglo-Saxon poetry, but they sure can dig up personal dirt on their teachers in a hurry.
The first call was late in the school year last year. I had gone to bed at a reasonable time at night for an adult – 10 pm – and had been asleep well over an hour when I heard the phone ring. I was too tired to get up, but I checked the message eagerly the next morning. It was a student – we’ll call him Joe – and Joe was screaming into the mouthpiece over a lot of background noise: “Schebel, Schebel…dude…I’m in Florida…..we won…we did it…we won the whole thing, yeah...Schebel…we did it… we did it, dawg!” There were some rustling noises, and then the phone went dead. Note that Joe did not identify himself, nor did he relay why he was in Florida, nor specifically what it was he had won. So, I hung up with a vague sense of gladness for somebody somewhere, and a sharper sense of confusion as to how this person got my number. Of course the next Monday I found out it was Joe, and he and his teammates really did win their first National Mock Trial Championship -- a testament to months of hard work reading case law, working with professional lawyers on presentation, case analysis, witness questioning, the whole works. And there was subsequently a huge celebration that Monday at school. And fortunately somebody called Joe at home (probably from a forbidden cell-phone), because he was planning to skip school that day as his own way of celebrating.
As it turns out, he called all of his teachers that night, so I was just one in a long line of slightly perturbed adults who had been awoken in the late-night hours of the weekend.
The second phone call was several weeks later, toward the middle of this last summer. Of course, I’m asleep at a reasonable time. At this point my second son had just been born, so I was lucky to be asleep in the first place. The phone rang close to midnight, and I heard it but ignored it. This time, I checked for messages the next morning, but found none. So I checked my caller ID, and it said something quite foreign to me. It said, “Inmate Phone 1.” My mind went immediately through the rolodex of names of people I know who could possibly have called from a local jail. It’s an unwitting but also a slightly amusing experience to imagine your best friends behind bars calling you in shame to have you bail them out for some offense. It’s even more amusing maybe to imagine what that offense might have been. Anyway, after checking with my friends, I still didn’t know who had called. Everybody was safe and sound at home, all boring advocates of good clean suburban living.
Not until later did I find out that the call was, again, from a student. We’ll call him Nick. Nick was in fact a student I know quite well. I had sponsored some clubs at school that he attended, and he had made it a point to take every one of my classes. He’s a quiet, unassuming, intelligent kid with good grades, good parents, and a good set of friends. But for whatever reason, he decided on the night of July 4th to celebrate with a few beers, take out some latent teenage angst on a couple of cars and garages at a local set of town-homes, and then run from the police officer who happened upon the scene. He was run-down, caught, and charged with burglary, trespassing, and resisting arrest.
My question to this day is, “why would a kid in this situation use his one phone call to try to reach a poor middle-aged English Lit Teacher? What, am I going to drive down to police headquarters and impress them with my comprehensive knowledge of Renaissance love poetry? I don’t think so. I’m not gonna spring him out of jail by distracting the police with a bunch of difficult vocabulary quizzes. But, anyway, he called me. Thankfully I didn’t answer, and he eventually reached his mom to reward her with the big news.
I’ll have more to say about these two calls and what they represent to me later. For now, I think we can see in them, yes, the triumph and the tragedies that teens experience, but also the perplexing, seemingly random behavior of which perhaps any young adult is capable. And I wouldn’t say that these two poles of life – the successes and failures – are exclusive to teens; everyone has them of course. But my feeling is that teens do experience these things differently – perhaps more acutely. Maybe with more deeply felt emotion. If nothing else, the experiences might be the same for adults, but most adults don’t call their English Lit teachers for bail at one in the morning.
So the question is “Do we deserve our teenagers?” I’m going to confess right off the bat that I’m probably not the best person to answer that question. I say that for two reasons.
First, I have not yet been a parent of teenagers. But I do know a parent of a teenager when I see one. You know these people? These people look haggard, tired – more tired even than this parent of a four year old and three month old. They have lines in their faces, extra wrinkles. They’ve got the “deer in the headlights” look. They are surprised by politeness at the grocery store. They get real confused when people agree with them without an argument. They know the true meaning of that old saw “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
But I’m not one of them…not yet. I do, however, talk to them on almost a daily basis. I respect these parents of teenagers because of their plight and because of their hard-won wisdom and expertise. I enjoy surprising them with good news, especially when I call and they answer the phone, “uh-oh, what did he do now?” So out of this respect, I am not going to claim to be an expert on teenagers, because I don’t have the experience of a parent.
My second reason for not being able to answer the question “Do we deserve our teenagers?” is because it’s part of my job to love and respect these kids unconditionally. I’m their teacher. I’m there to help them achieve something in life, and that necessarily requires me to assume that they can achieve success, that they want success, that they deserve success, and that they’re capable of learning how to define success for themselves with some measure of responsibility. I can’t possibly do my job well and assume anything but good from them. In fact, I teach according to an old proverb: “Always assume that there is a student in your classroom who is your superior in both heart and mind.”
I’m fortunate that most of the time I don’t have to assume that proverb, it’s just a reality for me.
So I’m not a parent of a teenager, and I can’t be objective because I have to love kids unconditionally as part of my job. So maybe I can’t answer the question. But in any case, I do spend a great deal of time with these kids. I know them. I often see sides to them that their parents or other adults don’t see. Every once in a while I can get one or two to open up, to take down the psychological walls, if only temporarily. And let me tell you, it’s an amazing reward to get to know these kids. They definitely have some things to say if you’re willing to listen. So if I can’t answer the question with authority, at least I can shed some light on whether or not “we deserve our teenagers.”
First, let me talk about what makes a teenager a teenager. Obviously in America we use this word and it has an easy definition – anyone between 13 and 19. Actually, “teenager” is an American word, coined in the 20th century. So it’s a relatively new word. There is a larger concept in use most places that is close, and that’s “adolescence.” Adolescence is that psychological, social, and biological transitional period between childhood and adulthood when a person undergoes puberty, acquires secondary sexual characteristics and a potential interest in sexual activity, starts to form a unique personal identity, and, according to Piaget, begins to form enhanced cognitive abilities in order to reason, deduce, and theorize on an adult level. In layman’s terms, it’s the time when kids tell you to “bug off” about their clothes, consider it a felony offense if you ask them to be home by midnight, argue with you about the most minute and obvious factual details, and somehow make you feel like you’ve done them wrong if they don’t have a car, the newest cell-phone, an IPOD, and a laptop computer.
Some critics argue that whole the notion of “teenager” and “adolescence” is simply a cultural construct, that these words have no real objective meaning in reality. But I don’t buy that. Are these folks going to tell me that there’s no marked difference generally between a 9-year old and a 16-year old in terms of sexual characteristics and interests? Or that the average 16-year old’s sexuality is the same in nature and intensity as a 40 year old’s? Don’t these common-sense biological facts have some common-sense psychological ramifications? Don’t we have to come to terms with these changes? Though I’m thankful that 16-year old girls don’t generally know what their male counterparts are thinking (and how often), I would be remiss as a teacher if I myself didn’t know. I know the reason why I have to repeat important facts to these kids six or seven times. They’re distracted. Sometimes you can almost smell the hormonal surges in the air. It’s no wonder they act strangely. So I work around it. I’m not willing to try to undo or quash these kids’ natural drives because I think the whole thing is some bogus cultural construct. Denying the reality of students’ developmental obstacles – be they a product of puberty or otherwise – would be unprofessional, not to say cruel, for any teacher.
Yes, culture is a part of the distinction between adolescence and adulthood, and is a descriptor of differences among teens of different generations. For example, kids today generally listen to a much wider variety of music because of the ready availability of songs in downloadable electronic format. Yes, I have numerous kids who, strange as it may seem, listen to both Snoop Dawg and Frank Sinatra. That’s a product of modern cultural and technological influences, and it makes a big difference in the lives of young-adults. But it seems to me that adolescents of every generation love music, especially since music has been widely available on recording, and that music is somehow a greater part of their self-identity than it is for most adults. Even the teenage Alexander the Great was scolded by his father Philip for his obsession with the flute.
So culture makes a difference in how we define adolescents and their behavior. Absolutely. But I’m not so sure the older generations are going to want to go that route of thinking as an argument that the “good old days” were better than today. In fact, as a result probably of cultural changes, today’s teenagers are 1) less likely to commit violent crimes, 2) less likely to drink as high school seniors, 3) less likely to binge-drink, 4) less likely to smoke, 5) less likely to have sex, and 6) less likely to get pregnant than their parents’ and sometimes even their grandparents’ generations. Despite Columbine, school violence as a whole is down as well. No matter what the conservatives tell you, academic performance is as good or slightly higher for modern-day teens as it was for previous generations. Recent math SAT average scores are at an all-time high, and a greater percentage of high school students now take advanced courses in English, foreign languages, math, and science than ever before.
These facts really shatter some of the myths we throw around about our kids. You know, 66% of adults believe that violent crime among teens has risen over the last decade, when in reality it’s dropped by more than half. 62% of adults think that most young people lose their virginity by age 15, whereas really less than a quarter of young adults have sex at or before that age. Still an alarming statistic, I grant. But get this. Three Quarters of adults think the teen birthrate has risen over the last five years, when really teenage births have fallen to an all-time low.
By the way 80% of our teens out there believe that we should have zero-tolerance policies for any kind of drugs in school, and the same 80% say they enjoy spending time with their parents.
Let me repeat that. 80% of kids say they enjoy spending time with their parents. Of course, their definition of “spending time” might mean “buying stuff for me,” but what’s the difference?
Given some of these statistics, do teens deserve our disrespect as we bemoan the so-called loss of values in the younger generation? Is it really fair to pick out one group of brave young men and women in our country’s history as “The Greatest Generation?” I say the verdict is still out.
Of course not every statistic on these kids is rosy. Suicide rates have increased, and the percentage of teens who are overweight has more than tripled since the 70’s. Worst of all, the percentage of adolescents growing up in extreme poverty in the United States has not changed for over 20 years. I think that speaks volumes about the priorities we’ve set in our culture. (all statistics from “Mysteries of the Teen Years,” US News and World Report Special Edition, May 10, 2005)
But let’s get away from cultural influences and go back to some hard physiological facts about the nature of teens. After all, if we want to determine whether we deserve them, we have to understand them. New research in neuroscience using functional MRIs and other technology is giving us much greater glimpse into the teenage brain than ever before. We can literally watch different areas of the brain light up while people are doing various activities. And we can repeat this process over long periods such that we’re beginning to understand the brain’s development over time. And we’re coming to understand that we were quite wrong about just how mature an adolescent’s brain is. Turns out that their brains are not the same as an adults’ but simply in need of some more facts about U.S. History or Algebra, or, dare I say it, proper grammatical structure.
Some of the major areas of the brain – the corpus callosum, the prefrontal cortex, and the cerebellum – these are really still under construction until age 20 or beyond. The corpus callosum handles the processing of information between the two hemispheres, the cerebellum supports higher learning skills, and the prefrontal cortex (the so-called “seat of civilization”) handles judgment and reigns in emotions. Alternatively, the amygdale, which gives rise to heightened emotions – like anger and sadness – forms more quickly than the rest of the brain, and is already fully active by mid-adolescence. In other words, teens have the reasoning skills of adults, but possibly have more acutely-felt emotions and probably the lack of ability to restrain those emotions. They also are therefore more likely to take risks and show poor judgment. This makes for a dangerous combination. It’s like a network overloading on itself. No wonder your son puts his fist through the door over an argument about, say, breakfast cereals.
No wonder.
Knowing what we do about their brain development, no wonder their judgment is not always exactly impeccable. No wonder the seniors last year thought it would be funny one day to run through the halls wearing gorilla suits and intimidating the sophomores (with bananas and all) during lunch. No wonder their senior prank was to put rubber ducks in all the school’s toilets, sinks, and drinking fountains. No wonder I once saw over 500 bouncy balls go hurtling through a hallway a quarter-mile long, tripping up confused students and teachers alike. No wonder a friends’ graduating class stole all the erasers from the school and then returned them, one by one, as they walked across the stage to get their diplomas. No wonder I got doused with “silly string” on my birthday last year when I walked into my room naively thinking the kids were being quiet because they were busy rehearsing their Shakespeare lines. No wonder I had a student who had trouble deciding whether or not to tell his father that he had wrecked the car (is this really an option?). And, of course, no wonder when on Halloween I’m wearing a Superman T-shirt underneath my shirt and tie, along with the requisite nerdy glasses– no wonder the kids are sometimes a bit amused when I force them to refer to me as “Mr. Kent.”
Yes, “deserving” as a general notion carries with it a level of moral awareness and moral responsibility. Adults usually possess these things. I’m not so sure kids have them at the level we expect. They often like to think they have moral awareness equal to our own. Certainly in some respects they have various cognitive capacities for theorizing and arguing. Yep, definitely for arguing. Perhaps we adults need a better plan for dealing with these strange entities that have roughly our rational powers but much less our capacity for emotional restraint and sound judgment.
So whose fault is it – if anyone’s – that during my short stint at another high school I watched a large group of Bosnian-Americans and African-Americans go at each other with knives and baseball bats in the school parking lot? Whose fault?
On my way into that same parking lot one chilly winter morning, I watched a young girl driving down a street hit a parked car. Not wearing a seatbelt, she flew face-first into and through the windshield, landing face-down on the pavement. I instinctively got out of the car and rushed to her. Turns out she was a student in my third period class. Kristen was her name. I held Kristen’s head, bleeding profusely, and kept her awake for 10 minutes before the paramedics arrived. I sat on the curb for 20 minutes after they left, in shock. I also nearly quit my job teaching that day for good.
Whose fault that teens have accidents at higher percentages than any other demographic? Whose fault?
Thank goodness she left the hospital a few days later with only some minor facial scars.
We know they lack a certain level of judgment. The neuroscience verifies that physiologically, the psychology verifies that behaviorally. How can we ignore that? How can we fail to put that knowledge into proper action? I’m not arguing for taking away all their rights, but let’s reexamine the justice of giving them more responsibility than they can handle. Let’s try harder to gauge exactly how much responsibility they can handle, and aim as closely as possible in practice and policy.
My very first year of teaching I had a young student, we’ll call him James, that began to falter academically midway through the fall semester. This was a brilliant kid. We’re talking 4.0, SATs out of this world, future ivy-leaguer here. I brought him in after class one day, asked what was going on. He pulled the usual defensive teenage reaction – “nothing, I don’t know, no big deal” – that kind of thing. But I persisted, and later that week got an hour-long confessional from him about how depressed he was, how he was using drugs and getting into trouble behind his parents back, wrecked his car, how his parents didn’t seem to care, etc. Being a mandatory reporter, of course, I informed his counselor. We asked for a meeting with the parents. The parents reacted without what I would have regarded as due concern. They had that haggard look I talked about earlier, the look of real desperation. James eventually dropped my class without a real explanation, despite the counselor’s and my concerns. And we never really heard from the parents, either.
The next year, this young man committed suicide. This bright, young teenager who was destined for a shining academic future shot himself. I went to his funeral, filled with hundreds upon hundreds of angry, remorseful, confused, and shocked teens and parents.
Whose fault? I dare not answer that one. I’m too afraid I myself would be on that list. Nevertheless, whose fault?
Did we deserve James? Yes. Did we deserve James’ out of control behavior? I don’t know. Did we deserve the loss of James? I don’t know. I admit some days I read the news and I think the whole world is suicidal. We reap what we sew.
Let’s reexamine a culture where teenage suicide continues to increase, and continues to exist at higher levels than the rest of the population.
Let’s also reexamine the justice of removing responsibilities and privileges from these kids when it doesn’t make sense. I know this is a superficial example, but why, for example, do we take away their cell-phones at school as if it’s a crime to own one. My school even slaps suspensions down and removes test-waiver rights on a third offense of using a cell-phone, even if it’s just between classes. Why? Because somebody at some school used a phone-camera to copy a test. Or because some administrator heard that some kid somewhere snapped an inappropriate photo in a locker room? Why punish thousands of teens for the mistakes of one or two? Better yet, why can’t we adults monitor our classrooms and our locker-rooms a little more closely, which happens to be our job in the first place? Why can’t we teach these kids the appropriate and polite use of cell-phone technology instead of making the essentially authoritarian and luddite decision to remove the technology altogether?
Do we deserve teens’ rebellious reactions to these kinds of rules, even and especially if the rules are not so rational and the system not so just?
This is nothing to say of more important social justice issues for teens. How is it that an 18-year old can wield a gun in Iraq or Afghanistan, but can’t take a drink of alcohol in his own country? Why is it that I consistently notice security guards at the mall profiling teenagers? With all due respect to our law enforcement, why do I constantly hear teens tell me stories about police pulling them over in really unjustified circumstances, bullying them in some rather unlawful ways? Can all of the stories possibly be untrue or exaggerated?
On this note, I’m reminded of those lyrics by a band called Mike and the Mechanics. “Every generation/blames the one before/and all of their frustrations/come beating at your door.” Do we deserve teenage rebellion when we’re bequeathing onto them the problems of carbon dioxide emissions out of control, global warming, abject poverty everywhere, conspicuous consumption and rampant consumerism, even more rampant imperialism, and a seemingly endless war in the mid-east that is hardly living up to the current administration’s idea of “stabilizing and democratizing the region”.
You’d better believe these kids are aware of these things. They act like it’s no big deal, they act apolitical, but they know their inheritance. They sneak peaks at the front pages of the newspaper when you’re not looking. It’s not all funny-pages to them. And they blame us. Maybe not vocally, maybe not outwardly, but they do. Do we deserve it?
Back to my two phone calls.
I figure that on a personal level I deserved both of those phone calls. I deserve to hear the elation in a young adult’s voice when he wants me to know that he just won the National Mock Trial Championship. Of course, he could have actually told me who he was and what he won in his message, but that’s okay. Their judgment isn’t always quite there, and I’ll accept that for what it’s worth.
You know, in fact, everyone in the community deserves to hear that kid scream about his victory. Maybe not at 11:30 at night, but we all deserve to hear it. His success is a success of the community.
Did I deserve to get the phone call from jail? Well, if I’m going to take some credit for the successes, I guess I’m going to take a bit of responsibility for some of the failures, too. And I did. I talked to justice officials to lighten the punishments against that student, and I even made a small impact, so I feel better about it.
In the long run, I know that daily life with teens, at least for me, is going to be like those two phone calls. I’m going to get to witness the virtuosity and sheer joy of life – what Whitman called the barbaric “yawp” -- of the National Champions, and I’m going to have to endure the loss of life and the jail sentences and the sheer madness of the ones not quite in control. Being human, I certainly have to accept both.
Whether I – whether we – deserve both kinds of calls is a matter we might not be able to answer, or we might not want to answer, but I think the phone is going to continue ringing anyway.
Closing Words: “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
Elements of Order of Service for 9/3/06, by Rob Schbel
1. Opening Quote “Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet, and they are growing.” -- Aristotle
2. Song Waltz #14 in E Minor, Frederic ChopinEvgeny Kissin, Age 13
3. Reading TITLE: “Confusions of a Teenage Mind” Laya Liebeseller
Confusions of a Teenage Mind, by Laya Liebeseller Feelings colliding, explosions within the soul, visions bluring, life’s turns turning to sharp to fast, hearts braking, traitors within our circle, faiths failing, worlds crumbling, turmoil constant in the brain.
Constant questions, who am I? What am I? Why am I? Part of an alien race, an alien mind, immersed in a world full of confused activity and creating a constantly changing culture that will never be understood.
Child, adult, not old enough, too old, not ready for the responsibilities given, needing to be mature, given no respect but expected to give it.
Labels, misfits, rebels, different, nothing, rules, no options, no opinions recognized, no voices heard.
Rebelling against the past, against the now, against the future, rebelling against parents and ideas forced, rebelling and breaking from the norm and the future set for us, breaking from our parents ideals, breaking form the cycle set in motion, provoking commotion and change.
Rebelling, hiding, seeing, but unseen, observing worlds, beliefs forming, ideas roaring, talking but unheard, screaming and unheard, needing to be heard but given no recognition.
Heads butting, attitudes flaring, teeth grinding, grounded, homes disintegrating before our eyes.
Wars in the home, fights in the yard, bullets fly around this world, threats of nuclear destruction, the fight against drugs, against poverty, against the world created now.
Wondering what happened. What happened to world? What happened to the peace marches and demonstrations? What happened to the flowers and ideas of conservation? What happened to the open minds of the world and why are they not excepting my helping hand? Why am I not fighting for my future? Why can’t I be heard? Why do my lip rings and tattoos shut the ears of those around me? Why am I not making them listen? Why am I not pressuring them to do what is right?
Peer pressure, self pressure, social pressure, parent pressure, the pressure of the future, the pressure to be better, to be the best we can be, the pressure to know how when why, the pressure of alcohol, drugs, high school, college, the pressure of suicide, the pressure to be the new generation, the pressure of being the corrupted generation, the pressure to be the generation to save this world from sheer destruction, the pressure, the pressure to find ourselves within the rave that is our mind.
You see these are the confusions of a teenage mind.
4. Special Music TITLE: “Photograph” -- Nickleback Steph Hutchison
5. Presentation TITLE: “Do We Deserve Our Teenagers” Rob Schebel
6. Closing Words: “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
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