Kids Today!

After I taught about a hundred years, people started saying something to me—I bet kids are worse now than when you started teaching.

I knew the right answer was to agree, to bemoan the current state of the world in general and of kids in specific.

But when I started teaching, kids were bad. Worst of all in my first year. They carved nasty words on desks and muttered them and sometimes shouted them out. They shot spit wads and flipped me off and positioned tacks on each other’s seats. And between classes, they flicked half-smoked cigarettes into restroom trashcans to start fires.

What’s strange is that through the decades, kids seemed to get better. I kept finding more good in more kids more of the time.

Take Christopher, for example. He struggled with sleep, every single morning. As a novice teacher, I’d have taken this as a sign of disrespect—that he thought I was boring and that I needed to bring him to task.

But in my last year of teaching, I appreciated his struggle. With a low-functioning mom and a dad who stumbled home from the bar most evenings, he kept his siblings afloat—in clean clothes with filled bellies and at their spelling words. He did all this before he could write his own book report. No wonder he came to class in a grouch. No wonder his temper flared enough to send out a punch now and then. No wonder.

As the decades passed, I rarely met a student I couldn’t teach. Every kid had good in there somewhere. The trick was to find out what it was, and then use it to teach that kid everything else.

It’s more effective—and way more fun—to find the good than to bemoan the bad.