A Tad Bit of Whining

I have observed, much to my chagrin, that many teenagers can't think past the tiny quibbles in their lives and into into the realms of imagination. Two days of watching yelling matches under the guise of improv have turned me off to so many of my students. No matter how many times I tell them that it really isn't that interesting watching two ghetto-fied kids yell, I see the same scene over and over again. I chalk it up to watching too much MTV (which I'm convinced was created to destroy the cognitive capabilities of the America's youth) and seeing little to nothing creative.

I'm also quite a bit frustrated about how much whining there is about the 'G'- rating upon which I insist. "Miss," they say, "we're all teenagers here, we can handle it." To which I reply, "That's nice, but it's even nicer to not have to. Besides, you all grow up too fast anyway. And since you're in my class, you will act like you live in a Disney world where everything is rainbows and butterflies." There is always the kid trying to be smart that says, "But I saw this Disney movie one time..." to which I reply "If Mickey didn't say it, then neither will you." They don't understand that the dirty joke is taking the easy way out.

The worst of them all are, of course, the freshmen who seem to have a new found confidence now that they are out of middle school and have yet to be beaten down by the Seniors since the campuses are separate. Full of snide remarks, they love to point out the error in an analogy (don't analogies always have errors?) which leads me to believe that their sole purpose in life is to drive me insane.