COLUMN: Some Things Have Changed

By Tobin Barnes
I’m starting my thirty-fourth year teaching high school students, so it’s natural that I often get the question, “Have the kids changed?”

Yep, I’m definitely the guy to ask. I’ve had a lot of experience with them.

During any given year during my career, conservatively estimating, I have had 150 individual students in all my classes. Take that times the thirty-three academic years I’ve completed, and that’s a whopping 4950 students.

Wow! It’s almost staggering. That’s a lot of potential impact that I, or any other secondary teacher, could have had over the course of a career.

Again, conservatively estimating—I hope this is very conservative—if I, or any other long-term teacher, has had a positive effect on only ten percent of all those students, that’s still a creditable 490 people.

That would be pretty good success in anybody’s book.

And as I said, I hope I’ve had more.

Obviously, I like being around teenagers. The last thirty-three years would have been pure hell if I didn’t. Like dogs, they can sense fear.

Uh huh, it’s not for everybody. With the wrong attitude on your part, teenagers can drive you barking mad, as they say in England.

Most of the time, however, I can get over that hurdle without too much effort and can then appreciate all the good qualities of teenagers. As a matter of fact, fairly well-adjusted teenagers are my favorite people. You just can’t beat their spontaneity, enthusiasm, and love of life. (It’s too bad that much of that seemingly gets doused in the next twenty years for all too many.)

But back to the question, “Have the kids changed?”

My short answer is always, “No.”

That basic bundle of interest and energy has not changed over the course of thirty-three years. There were great kids then that I admired and respected and there are great kids now. And, of course, there were confused, disruptive kids then and there are those kinds of kids now, though not really all that many in either time.

Teenagers often get a bad rap for various shenanigans—yes, in my time, too, and before—but the vast majority are firmly in the process of becoming fine people.

So, no, the teenagers themselves have not changed. But what has changed is their environment, and sometimes I wonder how they turn out as well as they do. Because of technology and mass media, kids today are exposed to things we didn’t know existed until maybe adulthood or beyond.

Sure, young people—and old people, for that matter—have been screwing up their lives since caveman days. There have always been ways and means to drag yourself down, if that’s what you’re looking for.

The difference is that the ways and means nowadays have multiplied almost exponentially. But it also must be said that opportunities for people to extend and fulfill themselves have multiplied, too.

There’s so much out there now: great, wonderful, good, bad, ugly, and, yes, sinister. We didn’t know a tenth of it when we were young, and that provided us with a comforting security and a certain insulation, but it also provided physical and mental limitations. Much of that, for good or ill, is not part of the lives of young people today.

So, once again, “Have the kids changed?”

No. But I have.

In many ways, I admire and respect young people even more than I did thirty-three years ago. Teenagers today are running a very complex gantlet of modern trip wires, but despite that, I can report that most of them are doing very well with the challenges.

As The Who used to state, “The Kids Are Alright.”