Back to School! Also, Fuck Your Nostalgia
Today's kids are fine, stop your whining!
It’s back to school time in America, and, like all teachers, I have been in the hamster-wheel level of busy over the last couple of weeks, getting my room in order, attending interminable training sessions and wading through rivers of paperwork, just to make sure I can teach your kids some mathematics they will likely forget the second they graduate.
And listen, I know the pain. Yeah, they can’t do the shit we did when we were their age. Said shit includes maniacal feats of mental math, using the slide rule and, in many cases, being able to read the analog clock. Just like we couldn’t shoe a horse, operate the cotton gin, kill a mammoth or whatever the fuck our parents told us they could do. Yes, your kids are heavily depended on technology. Just like we watched TV all day instead of playing stickball out by the tracks or something. Yes, they are on TikTok doing some kind of dance in the domain of -1 < x < 1, to make sure they don’t step out of the screen width, and yes, it’s stupid. So what?
I belong to the last generation of Soviet-raised children, and nobody whines about today’s kids more than my contemporaries. Oh, the spoiled brats who fall so woefully short of our own heroic standards! Oh, how we ran, barefooted, through the dewey fields of our nostalgic imagination to climb walnut trees! Oh, how we could do long division in our brilliant heads, adorned with ruffled hair, cut in the corner barbershop for 50 kopecks by a chain-smoking lady named Lidia! How great and unspoiled and rugged we were, unlike today’s decadent and ungrateful youth!
OK, fine. We could do fucking logarithms in 7th grade. That much is true.
I also had a geometry teacher who taught the class that I represent all the worst qualities of my people (those being the Jews, natch) and a gym teacher, severely traumatized while serving in the special forces in Afghanistan, who once took me to the locker room and very professionally beat me up, leaving no marks. While captaining the volleyball team, I once had a teammate show up falling-down drunk due to celebrating his 15th birthday with his grandfather, and when I had to put him in, he served the ball into the crowd and puked all over the floor. I had a classmate who, in Russian literature class, liked to take his dick out and bang it on the desk (in fairness, this was better art than whatever Dostoyevsky shat into our poor heads). And another classmate who was being prostituted by her mother to locally stationed soldiers beginning at the age of 14. And another classmate who burned himself to a pile of ashes at the age of 10 while playing cowboys and Indians in an unguarded power station. And almost all of us smoked by middle school, and all of us drank by high school.
And even if your childhood wasn’t as severe as mine, mine isn’t as severe as some of the Baltimore kids that I teach.
And one of my students has just published a video game that he wrote. And another is learning Russian and dreams of breeding reptiles. His classmate has done seven better, and has learned eight foreign languages, including Greek and Korean. And another who did one better and invented a language of his own, complete with a unique numerical system that made total sense, until you got to long division. Another wants nothing to do with college and plans on working with cars all his life, but is taking my AP Calculus class simply because math holds no secrets for him and he enjoys reminding himself of it. Another cooks extremely complex dishes for fun and loves talking to me about them. I have a star two-sport athlete who genuinely loves being educated. I had a student who was kicked out of the house by her mother, got into a terrible fight, missed 3 months of school, then made up every scrap of homework I had assigned in that time, earned a 95% average and is now off to the Marines to help her along in her goal of becoming a cardiovascular surgeon. I have students who write music, students who are never seen without a paper book, students who can talk sports for hours, students with an impeccable sense of comedic timing.
And yes, they love their technology. One of them missed a week with COVID last year, and had his girlfriend Face Time him while she was in my class, so he could “attend”. He raised his hand to ask questions, too.
The kids are fine. More than fine. They are better than us. Vastly, profoundly better. I believe in this with every atom of my being. Otherwise, my job would have been the most depressing one in the world.