My oldest daughter was telling me a story about how little respect teenagers get. She is 18, has been accepted to MIT, has some pretty impressive scholarships and has her name up on a banner at her high school. The last year, she has not spent much time at her high school except for a handful of AP classes, and has taken "release" time for college classes at a local college. Nonetheless, when she ended up at school after driving her younger sister in, she stayed in the common area to do math homework in one of her college classes. An assistant principal came up to her and asked her why she wasn't in class. She explained that she didn't have a class, that she was doing homework for her college classes but that they were in the evening. He continued to give her a hard time about it for a while and then walked away.

Her complaint about this is that she was not doing anything disruptive. She was quite obviously sitting down quietly in front of a book, with a notebook opened in front of her, working through problems. But because she wasn't doing what the authority figure thought she should be doing, he felt that it was his responsibility to go up to her and tell her what he thought. No adult would do this to another adult. He didn't ask her out of curiosity what she was doing. He treated her like a criminal for no other reason than that she wasn't following his idea of the rules. She pointed out that at 18, she is still not allowed to check herself out of school. She has to get a note from her mommy, though she could drop out of school if she wanted. What is this? Is this really the way to create independent adults who will contribute to society. Yes, there are jobs where you just have to do what you are told, but how many? Is that what a high school diploma prepares you for? Maybe it is.

There are certainly teens who give up on school just because it is too hard. There are also an awful lot of them who give up on school because it is too boring and isn't teaching them anything but how to sit in a class and listen to someone bore them. I think that teens in general deserve more respect and also the courtesy of being listened to. I wish that more adults remembered clearly what it was like to be a teen. The constant insistence that one must wait for respect no matter how well one acts now. The belittling of a teen's ideas simply because the teen is a teen. Nothing makes me angrier than to see my teens or any teens treated this way. Teens challenge adults because they are smart, not because they are simply rude. I love the way that teens make me see myself and my world upside down. It is one of the greatest pleasures of being around teens, and it is one of the reasons that I still write for teens.