Tomorrow is my last day working with kids at SLICK, a school-daycamp hybrid for students in Grinnell. At the risk of falling into the formula of all college students completing a summer job/internship between their junior and senior years, it was a life-changing experience that gave me clarity on what I want to do for the rest of my life. Before, I thought of teaching as a way to make a living that would give me a little time in the summer to devote exclusively to writing. But working with second graders this summer has been so rewarding, fascinating, and downright fun that I’m excited to be a teacher as a career in its own right, and am considering scrapping my plans to teach high school and moving to middle or elementary school.
A couple times throughout the summer, I’d come home at the end of the day, waste a little time scrolling through Facebook, and come across an article on my newsfeed with a title something like “The Kids of Today are Entitled, Selfish, Lazy, Rude, and Dumb, and it’s all Because of Smartphones” (I’m not sure if that was the title of an actual article, but I don’t doubt it; these thinkpieces are never exactly subtle, even in their titles). There would be an intense moment of cognitive dissonance where I’d think back on my day at work, playing tag and helping them read and trying to settle playground feuds of Shakespearean complexity, and wonder how these writers came to this conclusion.
Even though I instinctively didn’t trust these articles, their arguments actually sort of made sense, even given my good experiences with kids of this generation. They claim that constant exposure to phones, tablets, and computers have shattered kids’ attention spans and addicted them to instant fulfillment. I can’t say that any of the kids I worked with were particularly focused or patient, at least not without a little bit of help. They weren’t well behaved either; I don’t think I’ve ever gone through a whole day without telling one of them to pay attention or sit still or stop throwing rocks at each other. So why aren’t I onboard with this critique?
First off, correlation isn’t causation. Kids today are surrounded by technology. Kids today are bad at sitting still and following directions and doing complex tasks. Okay, but instead of assuming that one created the other, maybe the first thing to ask is if kids have ever been remotely good at sitting still, following directions, or doing complex tasks. You only have to look at old-school fables about kids who mouth off in class or forget to say their prayers at night and then get eaten by a witch or something to know that discipline has never come naturally to children.
But maybe these articles are still right, to some degree, at least as far as their actual arguments go. I don’t doubt that, if you compared kids today to kids in the 1950s, they’re less focused and obedient, and maybe part of that is new technology. (Part of that might be that beating children is generally frowned upon these days too, but not as many people write internet thinkpieces about that.) Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if kids spent a little less time on screens. What I really hate about these articles, I realize now, is how they take a statistical trend and use it to flatten out the personality of every child in America.. This leads to a much larger problem, I think: pretty often adults don’t see kids as human*. We see them alternately as cute decoration, fragile eggs that will only hatch properly if kept in the right circumstances, sepia-tone photos of innocence, or, in the case of these opinion-piece writers, wild animals in need of domestication. They’re none of those things; they’re humans, all of them. I’d say a kid has as a personality as unique and an internal life as rich as any adult’s by the age of four. Like adults, they have flaws too, anger and malice and envy, and sometimes entitlement or laziness. And, like adults, they each have dignity and each deserve respect. The main complaint of these opinion-piece writers seems to be that kids today are too disrespectful, but I wonder if any of the writers have ever stopped to think about the times they’ve disrespected kids, by exploding at them with hardly any provocation or demanding perfect obedience simply for having a couple more years of experience and a couple more feet of height. I admit that I’ve disrespected kids this summer. I’ve made light of their emotions and expected them to follow rules I never clearly articulated. Lately, I’ve tried to apologize to kids whenever I disrespect them like that. Some of my fellow teachers have warned me against this. Apparently being a teacher who apologizes is a death sentence in a classroom: it labels you a pushover and invites kids to see how far they much power you’ll cede. Maybe the other teachers are right, but it doesn’t seem fair to judge kids without holding yourself up to at least the same standards.
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* I’ll admit that, as someone who isn’t a parent, I probably don’t have a whole lot of credibility here.
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