On Being Ready to Teach Teenagers

The first time I was called to substitute teach, I was understandably nervous. I remembered what it was like to have a substitute. And I’d seen enough television shows to know how students generally behave when there’s a substitute. My assignment was to cover the modern equivalent of Home Economics—maybe it was called Life Skills or Domestic Entrepreneurship…something like that. The point being, I had experience that pertained to the class. My nerves weren’t due to the subject material.

Walking into that classroom of high school girls made me weak in the knees and sick to my stomach. Suddenly, I was in high school again, and they were the pretty girls with the right opinions, and I desperately wanted to be liked. All terrible things to be thinking about when you are the grown-up in a room of teenagers.

We made it through the powerpoint in twenty minutes. That left thirty-five minutes vacuously open to be filled by lots of chatting with friends and trips to the bathroom to check their phones. As soon as the teacher has no plan for class time, the students assume they control those available minutes. And it’s hard to argue that they’re wrong. I didn’t know what to do to fill the time. So, they colored and chatted, went to the bathroom, and worked on other homework. It got loud. I grew uncomfortable. I knew I had no control over the situation.

When I left campus that morning, I realized I wasn’t ready to teach teenagers. The lack of control, the inability to fill time, it all scared me too much.

Fast-forward six years. I have teenagers of my own. I’ve sat by their friends at football games and driven their friends to volleyball games. I know teenagers better. I know myself better. At several points along the journey of parenting teenagers, I have had to walk the line of being their parent or being their friend. That wisdom prepared me to teach teenagers.

If I treat my students like my friends—I won’t be able to teach them anything. Someone has to be the grown-up in the room. With authority. With a plan. With wisdom. And an adult pretending to be a teenager, to like what they like, to admire what they admire, cannot call them to a higher wisdom because she is still wandering the streets with them listening to Lady Folly.

Two months into teaching my first class of teenagers, I was worried. I texted a friend who had a child in my class, “Am I being appropriately difficult? Or, am I treating them like fifth graders?” She replied, “They think you are pretty difficult. They don’t like you, but they respect you.” They don’t like you, but they respect you. That stung. Until I realized it was exactly where a teacher of teenagers needs to be. Being liked and being respected are not the same thing. Teachers confuse the two to their detriment.

By the end of that year, two students had chosen to fail my class. But the others told me often how much they learned and how prepared they were for college. A couple of them visited prospective universities and knew they could succeed in the classes they had observed because of their experience in my class. Did all students have that experience? No. But the teacher makes this experience possible by offering it to her students. The rest is between the student and the Holy Spirit.

Teaching teenagers is not for the faint-hearted. These students are becoming adults, and they need to understand how adult relationships work, how to submit to authority, and how to treat those in authority with respect. They need to know how to do hard things even when they don’t want to or be prepared to face the consequences. These are the life lessons we are able to offer in a classical school because here we are unashamedly about creating virtue. As Aristotle has told us, a man becomes virtuous by performing virtuous deeds. We must ask our teenage students to perform virtuous deeds believing by faith that those deeds—by the grace of God—change their hearts.