Kids Today (or, Back When I Was a Kid)

I am privileged to teach Sunday School for the 7th-12th graders at our church.  It's a privilege every week, and most Sundays it's fun too.  :)  (Kidding.  Mostly.)  The students in my class, like most teenagers, come in varying degrees of communication, enthusiasm, and participation.  They are a beautiful and lovely group.

Our curriculum this year is the Heidelberg Catechism.  A couple of weeks ago I had prepared a lesson that I knew would be more fun with as many participants as we could get--plus I'd purchased a lot of candy for it, and I didn't want to have the extras at my house.  Since there were only three students in class that day, I decided that we would have a chat session instead of using our normal lesson. 

I asked my students two questions:
1) What issues--social, person, etc.--would you like to talk about this year?
2) What do you wish adults knew (or remembered) about being teenagers?

As I was introducing our topics, it occurred to me that though I'm not old it has been longer since I've been a teenager than it took me to get there.  I mean, I graduated from college 13 years ago.  Craziness.  It also occurred to me that perhaps the problem we're having with our curriculum being relevant is the fact that it was written by people who had been teenagers even longer ago than I was.  Nothing against adults, but I began to wonder how life had changed since then and how we as adults could speak to that unless we understood it.  So we spent an hour talking about it.

Here's what I learned:
* High school teachers today sound more like college professors.  Students get syllabi from every class, and teachers allow different things in class--some allow notetaking on computers, some allow you to ask questions, some just want you to sit like a bump on a log and absorb their lecture.
* Still not everyone is offered drugs.  I wasn't, though I had some friends who smoked pot, and it was interesting for me to hear that that's still true.  However, I was shocked to find out that there are teenagers walking through the halls at their schools with mushrooms hanging out of their backpacks.  They use meth, too.  And instead of cigarettes it's pot they're smoking in the bathrooms.
* Kissing in the hallways isn't the whole issue anymore.  Students at local high schools have been caught having sex--yes, having sex--in the hallways and on the middle of the dance floor at prom.

We ran out of time before we got much further.  After class they mentioned a couple of other things they'd like to talk about, including homosexuality.  (That should be an interesting experience, and I've already selected some guest speakers to deal with it so that I don't get myself in trouble by not wearing my traditional church filter that day.)  Apparently there are lots of kids in schools today who are gay--and there are lots of kids who are homophobic.  That makes for interesting hallway experiences.  I can't imagine being a student today.

So . . . how does one who was a teenager nearly 20 years ago relate to a world so different than where I lived?  Kids today.  They're lovely and giving and beautiful and honest and it's a privilege to be trusted by them.  God--and the church--has His hands full with them, and I can't wait to see how they change His world.  I hope I don't mess them up.