Everybody and Nobody

“Everyone in the 9th grade was out of control today.” In my first year of teaching, I had had it with 9th grade shenanigans. I walked into the Faculty Room and spouted hyperbole, looking for sympathy.
“Really? Everyone? What about Beth?” Al Tomlinson had been teaching for forty years; he had been one of my teachers. He was jovial and imperturbable.
“No, I guess not.”
“And Rob?”
“No.”
“So not everyone. How many?”
“Well… Michael and Nick. And Simone was annoying.”
“That’s it? Three? Aren’t there twenty-four in the class?”
“Um, yes.”

He’d made his point. Many teachers do this, describe a class as “out of control,” when, really, most of the students are trying hard to behave, and only one or two students can’t control themselves. Or, rather, are controlling themselves in a way designed to irritate a new teacher and amuse themselves and the class. (Students who actually can’t control themselves are pretty rare, and it’s part of a teacher’s job to learn how to manage or discipline a class so that children feel secure—“secure” means, in its roots, “without care”—enough to be in control of themselves, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Students succumb more readily to the same generalizing tendency: “Everybody else has a laptop. Everybody eats junk food all the time. Everybody’s parents let them drink. Everybody’s parents let them to stay up until midnight on school nights, out until 2 a.m. on weekends. Everybody smokes dope. Everybody dresses like that. Nobody does their homework. Nobody likes Mrs. Costigan. Nobody likes me. Nobody cares if I don’t do my homework. Nobody comes to school on time.” They are young. They are learning the differences between themselves and the world, and they set these two as equal and opposite; they don’t yet see themselves, often, as one individual in a sea of individuals. Rather, they see only themselves and the world, the “not-themselves.”

Parents listen to their children, sometimes too readily. What other source of information do they have? Annual or twice annual parent-teacher meetings? Infrequent phone conversations with a teacher, or chance meetings in the parking lot? Parents talk to each other, and that can help. But if each one is informed by a child or a teenager, the reliability of their information may be skewed.

Also, parents—even parents like me who have taught teenagers for more than twenty years—may be too sympathetic to their own children. In fact, I developed a theory a while ago that parents pass through a second childhood and adolescence with their children. At times, talking to the parents of a third grader is like talking to a large, mature, intelligent, but emotional third grader.

Parents, rightly, take to heart what their children experience and report, lopsided as this may be. Teachers can help them, and help themselves, in two ways: First, while acknowledging and respecting student and parent experience (we can’t deny the emotions that others feel, much as we may not like them), we can offer simple facts. Fewer than half the students have laptops. Most students eat healthy snacks. Most parents don’t let their children drink alcohol. Average bedtime is 10 o’clock on school nights and midnight on weekends. And so on. The myths are endless and demythologizing is a constant practice.

Second and perhaps better, we can get parents together for structured discussions about these topics—computer use, bedtime and sleep, parties, drugs and alcohol, clothing. Parents will quickly find allies and learn that they are not alone in this business of raising their children.