As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve had many seasons of life thus far. I guess I consider a ‘season’ to be a slice of time that can be put into a bracket with one to two defining characteristics. One of the longest and most distinctive would have to be when I taught high school for a little over a decade. Not exactly a ‘slice of time.’
More like a chunk.
I don’t mean to sound crotchety or bitter as I’m not really either concerning that time in my life. Well, ok…that’s not entirely true. Some of those band parents kept me up at night and made my life a little bit of a nightmare. We had a group Facebook page for the performing groups, for example, and I actually had to set comments to need approval because it had become so incredibly toxic. This led to said page being closed and archived. And this is not what I am meaning to post about tonight at all, so we’ll leave this here and (hopefully) never pick it back up.
This is about those kids that I taught for that decade or so and, more generally, kids today. Before I started professionally teaching high school in Eastern Kentucky, I made a lot of my college tuition money working for marching bands. In particular, I gigged as a percussion instructor and arranger. The pay was actually pretty ok and I got to walk away from it once marching season ended. This last fact would turn out to be a very important difference in doing that versus being the full time director I became once I graduated.
Once I did graduate, I moved to Harlan, Kentucky and drove around the county daily as an itinerant middle school band director by morning, and a high school band and choir director by night. When I think about how many miles those three years put on my poor Pontiac Vibe…I weep. I’ll say this for those kids, they were both humble and proud. They were easily some of the most eager to learn while also being some of the hardest working kids I’ll have ended up teaching. Their loyalty was intense and I miss many of them to this day.
Unfortunately, I misread a situation regarding some potential nepotism (ok, it turned out to be pretty spot on) as my good friend was let go as assistant to make room for the other director’s recently graduated son. To me then, this was writing on the wall and that writing was, “get out on your own terms before you can’t.”
This led be to where I would remain until my teaching career became an administrative one: Northern Kentucky. These kids were very different from my previous ones and I’ll admit that, at first, I thought it was for the worse.
I was very wrong.
This brings me to my central point for this post: kids are kids and have always been kids. My first group weren’t necessarily better than my second, they were just the product of very different circumstances. My Northern Kentucky group boasted a higher starting ability, but were harder to get to follow and be eager to learn. This created a lot of friction between these kids and me at first. Luckily, though, the thing that both groups had in common was an outpouring of personality. And, truth be told, in the end…the result was largely the same for both groups despite their being so different in those regards.
I learned a lot from these kids, especially towards the end of my teaching career. They said what my generation would call “the quiet part” out loud. I’ve heard a lot of colleagues say that kids today lack a sense of shame and that our society is and will continue to suffer for it. Kids today are like those kids I taught: products of their circumstances.
Actually, and you can feel free to unfollow me for this: kids today are just like kids from my generation. Not to beat a horse, but the circumstances that 80’s kids faced were not the same as kids around 2020. I say this and yet I constantly find myself online going to bat for this generation against my own generation. I’ll use a recent interaction I had with a friend on Facebook to illustrate this.
Friend posts (essentially) concerning seeing a quote about publicly being a part of a shared experience:
“Shared experiences (like watching a film in a theater or worshiping together) offer a deeper connection than solitary digital encounters with art and beauty.”
The comments get into what kids do today being a lesser version of things we did when we were young. My response, colored by my own life experiences, was:
“Well, I think that I would word most of that in the past tense. I think that while our generation totally relate to this (as well as to shaking our fists at the ever more insular skibidi’s and such), we miss the bigger point that the gatekeepers are no longer at the gates that we’re familiar with and, since their new gates and their respective keepers are unknown to the paths we’ve so well trod, we’re convinced that one thing must be better than the other.”
First, now that I reread that I see that I was being a pretentious prat. Secondly, I stand by it: things are wildly different now than they were then and kids are, just like we did when we were young, typically just trying to make it through it all and (hopefully) figure themselves out. I hate that they have to do all of that while being constantly shown/told that they’re missing something vague that, even if we did define, wouldn’t impact them nearly the way it did us.
To me, saying that today’s kids are somehow ‘missing out’ or, worse, ‘lesser’ is incredibly naive and almost narcissistic. The quiet part that this says out loud is that our generation is the last great one and this generation is our doom.
And, honestly, isn’t that what every generation has been saying?
Forgive me for the meme and let’s take the word ‘kid’ out for a bit. We have a variety of devices that connect us to a globally extended and instantaneously accessible world. For better or worse, we can know how close our country is to war by checking a notification on our watch. Someone can piss us off in a restaurant and we can go public op-ed and flame their whole business from our car as it still sits in their parking lot. I have trouble being an adult and can only imagine how insane it must be to be a kid right now.
Kids today handle a lot of things in ways that generations prior to them have a hard time grasping. Characteristics (being insular, avoidant, distant from shame) emerge that previous generations are immediately confrontational to. Why? Because these same characteristics had different contexts in different times. If I wasn’t ashamed of something I had done wrong as a kid, I ‘didn’t care’ and ‘wasn’t invested enough.’ If a kid today acts the same way, it means something totally different…they’re protecting themselves from being over-encumbered with even more criticism, for example. Yet, they still have to endure the associated dogma of a generation they weren’t even alive to be a part of. That said, there are always exceptions and I speak from my own experiences with today’s youth. Essentially: experiences may vary.
One last example for any readers around my age (43): remember how small the world was before we graduated high school? I know I at least only knew the town I grew up in plus whatever I saw on TV. Sure, everyone may have known the hot gossip of the week, but once it passed it was gone and (usually) forgotten. Today? Kids grow up connected to the entire world and nearly everything posted is archived in one way or another. How can we expect them to attach to a hometown feel like we did when they come out of the box understanding ours is just a grain of sand on the beach? How can we ask them to confidently go forth in their beliefs when they can be so easily held against them?
We don’t have to understand how they adapt to their circumstances, but I would think that we could, at the very least, appreciate their struggle as it was once ours as well; it just looks a little different today. Kids are kids and we should give them the grace and guidance we once longed for ourselves as they navigate their ever-changing worlds, learning who they’ll be and how they’ll get there.
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