Good morning!

Good morning, God, and thank you very much for this new day in my life.  I have a lot ahead of me on this day, and I do appreciate the fact that I have another day to live through, during which I can experience new things and be of some help to others, in my own little ways.  I thank you for helping me to find positions and situations in which I can be of help, in which I can serve others by doing things for them that they need.  I know that not all of my students want to learn all that I have to teach, of course, but at least I'm in a position in which I can have a bit of a positive influence.

I am concerned about the students here, though.  I'm not sure if here is the town I'm in or the times I'm in, but  for the most part, students don't seem to have much enthusiasm about learning at all.  Is that because they don't care at all, or because they don't see much of a future for themselves?  Is it because they're afraid of actually learning something, or because they're afraid that they won't learn it?  In any case, it's a shame because for the most part, I see kids basically just wasting their time in class, doing assignments by copying and by rote, but not really learning the material that they should be learning.

This I think is the hardest part of teaching--watching young people not live up to their potential, not learn what they could be learning for their own good.  We know the long-term benefits of what we're teaching, but the students can see only the short-term pain in the neck.  They want to perform on tests and quizzes and papers and then just move on to the next thing, without really learning any of the material that we cover.  There are, of course, the exceptions, those who strive to do well, but there don't seem to be as many of them.  And maybe that's just me, remembering what things used to be like through rose-colored filters instead of seeing the reality.

These are just some concerns.  I still do the best I can at what I do.  I'll still try to help them learn.  But there have to be better systems in which students can learn, achieve, excel.  There have to be better paradigms to follow, if the kids aren't interested in this one.

A reply:

You're caught up in the age-old dynamic of seeing the young people as "not like we were."  I'm glad to see, though, that you recognize that your perspective isn't necessarily accurate, and that you know that people have been saying such things about young people since people have been around.  It's the oldest conflict in the book, more or less.

On the other hand, you also realize that young people these days are facing more challenges than young people ever have had to face.  They face many more addictive games and pieces of technology, they have much less time with their parents and other significant adults, they receive more conflicting messages every day than any generation ever has, from all sorts of media that simply didn't exist when you were young.

They aren't much different than you were, or than your parents were.  What's different is the world around them and the methods and strategies that they've developed to deal with that world.  You're working with young people who have more information available to them than any generation before them, but who haven't been taught new ways of dealing with that information.  They feel that they have access to everything, but they also feel very small and insignificant because they aren't able to reach a level of significance in their own worlds with their own families.

Keep working with them.  Keep treating them with respect, and keep trying to help them succeed.  That really is the most important thing of all--that they have adults in their lives who treat them well and who expect good things from them.