Are you game for a challenge? If you’ve migrated to my show notes, I’m guessing the answer is yes. This challenge will encourage you to confront obstacles you unintentionally may place between your student and you. 2018 is brand new year. Let’s climb aboard the resolution train and evolve. Our kids will be the massive beneficiaries.

Before we can board the self-improvement train, I want to assure you that adult frustration with young people is certainly nothing new. Adults have generally held the younger generation in low regard. Harry Truman is one of my favorite presidents. He is often quoted, but check out this gem “The only thing new in the World is the history that you don’t know.” Priceless! President Truman seemed to be echoing this famous passage from the Hebrew Scriptures:

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1: 9

For those who are annoyed with today’s lazy teens:

The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five in the morning, and the younger generation doesn’t think much of it either.  

John J. Welsh, 19th Century Contractor who Built Broadway

For those who are sick of competing with cell phones:

What business has science and Capitalism got bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them?

Henrik Ibsen, Late 19th Century Norwegian Playwright

For those who forget the 1960s and 1970s:

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana!  Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan Speech Writer

For those who cannot stand the arrogance of today’s youth, but don’t recognize the smugness of their contemporaries:

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

George Orwell, 20th Century British Novelist

For those who feel like earlier generations were more noble:

It’s one of nature’s ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.  

Igor Stravinsky, 20th Century Russian Composer

For those who think that generation gaps are a result of our modern industrial world:

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words.  When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.

Hesiod, Poet of ancient Greece writing in 700 BC two hundred years prior to Athens’ Golden Age.

And finally this timeless treasure from an unknown author:

There is nothing wrong with today’s teenager that twenty years won’t cure.

Heard enough?  Unfortunately, many adults think that this crop of teenagers are the harbingers of the apocalypse.  They are not.  The world will go on.  Hopefully the previous quotes demonstrate that adults from different times and climbs have felt similar anxiety about their youth.  Harry Truman was right; there is truly nothing new in the World.

Episode Template

The Problem:

Teachers can get fed-up with contemporary youth.

The Solution:

Learn to accept that many student-teacher annoyances are out of your control.

What you can do Tomorrow:

• Make a list of all the things about contemporary youth that you find distasteful.

• Eliminate everything on the list that is out of your control.

• Your New Year’s resolution is to focus your energy to help students improve in areas where you have influence and to accept aspects of their nature’s that you can’t control.

To learn more about connecting with kids, check out my first book You’ve Gotta Connect. 

Learning to focus in this way will help your students and take a huge burden off your shoulders. HAVE A MARVELOUS 2018 AND THANKS FOR LISTENING!

Listen to “86-A NewYear’s Resolution that will Transform your Interactions with Kids” on Spreaker.