By Chad Miller
When I’m engaged in small talk, people inevitably ask what I do for a living, and I proudly tell them that “I teach high school English.” Many respond with some sort of Pavlovian scowl and offer a sympathetic prayer from the heavens. “God bless you,” they say, as if working with teens rivals a plunge into the deepest circles of Dante’s raging inferno and only God himself could save me from the conflagration.
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 “demise of civilization.” 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.
I reject that thinking. Kids continually teach me that those labels just don’t stick. When 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’s easier to be optimistic.
Teens aren’t careless; I’ve learned they’re empathetic and caring. In fact, they care a whole lot about each other, their futures, and everyone else’s futures, too.
Teens aren’t mindless; I’ve learned they’re reflective, thoughtful, mindful, and mentally tough. They want to learn, to live intellectually, to fulfill their infinite potential. They gaze upon the stars. They ponder life’s big questions. I’ve learned that teens aren’t a catalyst to Dante’s fiery dystopian Armageddon, but that they positively nudge us into a more hopeful, peaceful future.
They’re not a weak link, but the next link, a bit more forward-thinking, a bit more tolerant. You see, teenagers haven’t inherited humanity’s worst traits. On the contrary, they’ve inherited humanity’s best traits — it’s natural selection at work, a survival mechanism of cosmic importance. Teenagers are evolved. They’re 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.
And in some distant future, humanity will have irrevocably changed. We’ll be even more reflective and thoughtful — a radiant constellation of intelligence and vision and compassion and morality. Our species will mature. We will continue the quest for progression. It’s what we do. And we will prevail, because all of us, yes, teenagers too, will continue to evolve into our best selves.
—English teacher Chad Miller was selected as Region IX Educator of the Year and was honored at the California League of High School’s 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.
