TeacherScribe

Last night when I drove to Gail's to pick up our patio furniture; I listened my way through the 60 Minutes podcasts on my ipod.  I had forgotten about the wonderful piece on the Milenials (see the video below). I love that little clip they show of all the kids at the athletic event holding up trophies.  It seems we are paying for the "you are ALL special" mantra that parents have drowned their kids in. It reminds me of that great line from Pixar's The Incredibles, when the mother won't let her son show of his incredible speed, hence his name, "Dash," she tells him, "everyone is special."  Dash replies, "Which is another way of saying that no body is." I think the Milenials are the products of being coddled by their parents and led (wrongly) to believe that they are truly special in whatever they do. I think of parents (and be careful here, Kurt, so that you don't fall prey to this one day) who flock to the front rows of middle school choir recitals and elementary basketball games to video tape every second of their son or daughter's performance. Really.  Does anyone ever watch those things? Dad made all the football games he could.  But he was often late because he had to finish harvesting.  But his lateness proved a vital lesson to me:  it's just a game.  I knew he loved football.  But it taught me that there were some things – like earning a living – that take precedents to such trivial things as sports. Have we not lost that? I think of another podcast I was listening to from Dan Carlin in which he was talking with a history professor.  The professor was talking about human nature.  He posited that human nature was constant.  The only thing that really changed was our environments and influences.  The professor was arguing that we are not necessarily more self-absorbed than we were in the past.  That potential for self-absorption is constant in human nature.  However, he argues that certain changes in our culture and lifestyles have caused us to give in to that trait more than in the past. And this is that part that reminds me of the Milenials and their 'me first' lifestyles. The professor stated that we have –to use his terms –lost the yeoman farmer experience.  Since only a fraction of the population actually farms or works intensively, the rest of us have lost that closeness to nature – and its brutality.  Hence, a farmer in early American history could work tirelessly to produce a crop to feed his family.  Yet, just because of a change in the weather, a storm could ruin it completely.  And that farmer had to deal with it.  Through no fault of his own, everything was lost.  Dealing with that type of brutality in life forced one to have little time for self-centeredness. The Milenials could use a little does of brutality.  Or what my parents dubbed, "the Real World." But more power to them if they can actually force "the Real World" to conform to them!