By Chad Miller<\/p>\n
When I\u2019m engaged in small talk, people inevitably ask what I do for a living, and I proudly tell them that \u201cI teach high school English.\u201d\u00a0Many respond with some sort of Pavlovian scowl and offer a sympathetic prayer from the heavens.\u00a0\u201cGod bless you,\u201d they say, as if working with teens rivals a plunge into the deepest circles of Dante\u2019s raging inferno and only God himself could save me from the conflagration.<\/p>\n
And I get it; but teenage life is tough. Kids are bombarded with a cavalcade of labels and harsh judgment. Adults often view teens as tech-addicted narcissists, too careless and self-absorbed with inane social media posts to worry about anything that actually matters and then scapegoat them as some sort of mindless \u201cdemise of civilization.\u201d As if that Snapchat post is a harbinger of the day we meekly submit to our robot overlords as weak, hapless links in our long chain of being as a species.<\/p>\n
I reject that thinking.\u00a0Kids continually teach me that those labels just don\u2019t stick.\u00a0When we focus on building community, when kids sit at tables and talk every day, when we model and teach growth mindsets, when students are given time and space to think and reflect and question, it\u2019s easier to be optimistic.<\/p>\n
Teens aren\u2019t careless;\u00a0I\u2019ve learned they\u2019re empathetic and caring. In fact, they care a whole lot about each other, their futures, and everyone else\u2019s futures, too.<\/p>\n
Teens aren\u2019t mindless; I\u2019ve learned they\u2019re reflective, thoughtful, mindful, and mentally tough.\u00a0They want to learn, to live intellectually, to fulfill their infinite potential.\u00a0They gaze upon the stars.\u00a0They ponder life\u2019s big questions. I\u2019ve learned that teens aren\u2019t a catalyst to Dante\u2019s fiery dystopian Armageddon, but that they positively nudge us into a more hopeful, peaceful future.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re not a weak link, but the next link, a bit more forward-thinking, a bit more tolerant. You see, teenagers haven\u2019t inherited humanity\u2019s worst traits.\u00a0On the contrary, they\u2019ve inherited humanity\u2019s best traits \u2014 it\u2019s natural selection at work, a survival mechanism of cosmic importance. Teenagers are evolved. They\u2019re the cutting-edge, most up-to-date members of our species, spearheading our slow (sometimes painfully so), incremental march forward, a few nanometers of progress, but progress nonetheless.<\/p>\n
And in some distant future, humanity will have irrevocably changed. We\u2019ll be even more reflective and thoughtful \u2014 a radiant constellation of intelligence and vision and compassion and morality. Our species will mature. We will continue the quest for progression. It\u2019s what we do.\u00a0 And we will prevail, because all of us, yes, teenagers too, will continue to evolve into our best selves.<\/p>\n
\u2014<\/em>English teacher Chad Miller was selected as Region IX Educator of the Year and was honored at the California League of High School\u2019s yearly conference in Sacramento last month where he was a finalist for the state Educator of the Year title for Northern and Southern California regions. <\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Chad Miller When I\u2019m engaged in small talk, people inevitably ask what I do for a living, and I proudly tell them that \u201cI teach high school English.\u201d\u00a0Many respond with some sort of Pavlovian scowl and offer a sympathetic prayer from the heavens.\u00a0\u201cGod bless you,\u201d they say, as if working with teens rivals a […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1041,"featured_media":228657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11558","_seopress_titles_title":"Guest editorial: Teens are our \u2018next link\u2019 of progress","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11558,11593,11552],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mission-times-courier","category-no-images","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1041"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}