Thoughts On A YouTube Generation

A little over ten years ago, my father retired from 30 years of teaching middle school world history and geography, and my mother kicked herself upstairs to the countywide administrative level after 25 years of teaching law and justice and geography. (Yeah, I know my social studies, right?) Before their departures from the classroom, though they have agreed on little else since I've known them, they agreed on this: Kids are different these days.

Mom said that about the changing attitudes of children not too long after a student—a classmate of mine—dropped a little chalkboard cleaner in her coffee when she wasn't looking. Local politics kept the boy out of trouble (his dad was sheriff), but not out of the path of my clenched teenage fists.

If camera phones and YouTube were around then, I imagine you would have seen it online or on the news already. You may have seen on the news, just a couple of years before the chalkboard cleaner incident, that a student shot a teacher and a janitor in the neighboring county. Instances like these were rare enough then that you may not have heard about them on the scale that you would later hear about Columbine or Paducah, again in my home state.

I thought still that those were just isolated incidents of temporary insanity, that my parents were provoked into their viewpoint that kids were different by age and by unfortunate pranks. (More than once the car had to be taken in to remedy the bumper-to-bumper key-scratch down the side of it after sitting in the high school parking lot. Teenagers were just punks, I concluded, even if I was one.)

It's hard not take their viewpoint that kids are different, though, when you discover an assault on a cheerleader ambush posted on YouTube not even a week earlier. It's hard not to remember and appreciate my parents' warnings when I told them, at the uber-idealistic age of 18, that I wanted to teach high school and make a real impact on the youth where I could.

I don't know whether to be comforted or disturbed that it happens in other countries and not just in the States. This report of ten year-olds in Britain