Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”
First, you must accept that you aren’t.
When you are dealing with teenagers, you have to get comfortable with contradictions. In order to start your journey to coolness, you have to know that adults are always at least a little bit uncool. Even if you are unshakably cool, like Billie Eilish or Chappelle Roan, there will be a teenager who rolls their eyes and looks like they would rather die than speak to you. It just gets worse for the rest of us, pathetic adults who are just mere mortals.
You also have to know that you will be out of the loop.
I truly thought I could escape this one. I’m hip with the kids! I’m on Discord, I have a Tumblr (okay, maybe not a point in my favor), I have a passing understanding of Fortnite and what sigma means, and the people I talk to the most are teenagers. My students would keep me in the loop, right? They wouldn’t just say things and then refuse to explain them to me and laugh as I looked up Urban Dictionary. Impossible.
Alas, the internet moves simply too fast, and you are too tired to keep up with it. I would have to have a TikTok account to understand why people keep using the acronym oomf, likely, and there are some things I just will not do. I’ve found that embracing the ignorance while having a few moles who you can whisper or shoot a text to in order to make sure the phrases whizzing around you aren’t ‘hawk tuah’ levels of inappropriate (do not say I didn’t warn you) is the most effective strategy here.
But take heart, my fellow adults! All hope is not lost! You do not have to stew in the pits of ignorance and unhipness. You simply need to learn how to be useful to teenagers.
Teenagers are not stupid. When you see them chewing styrofoam cups and hear them talking about their daily four Monster Energy drinks, you may think them to be. (They do not always make the brightest decisions. Surely we can remember what being in the throes of puberty was like.) They know you have something to offer them; you just have to figure out what it is.
During the first in-person prom for the online school where I teach, some of the teachers were on hair and make-up duty. They gussied up our students, most of whom had never seen each other’s faces before, and made them feel like the belles of the ball. I had another job: to make an absolute fool of myself on the dance floor. Getting kids to dance at a regular prom is hard enough, and that’s when they all are used to existing within the same four walls of each other. But letting them be able to squint and go, “Is that Ms. Johnson? What is she doing?” and then flee in terror as I danced my way over to them meant that if they did muster the courage to dance, there is zero chance that they would be worse than my terrible moves.
Unfortunately, teenagers will not tell you what you can give to them most of the time—that requires a lot of self-awareness, which they simultaneously have in spades and have none of. It’ll take some trial and error, but the more times you get it right, the higher chance you have of a teenager sizing you up and deciding yeah, you’re alright.
This goes hand-in-hand with another universal truth about dealing with teenagers: you must be yourself, at all costs.
Teenagers can sniff out insincerity like a rat. Maybe this comes from them being on a knife’s edge socially all the time, consistently watching their back, trying to decide who can be trusted with their full vulnerable self and who will weaponize it against them. You may feel like in order to be trusted by a fifteen-year-old, you have to like the kind of things they like and know the kind of things they know. But trust me: it’s going to be a lot easier for you if you just offer your full adult self to the kids.
Yeah, maybe you don’t have any social media and your idea of a good time is doing a crossword puzzle at 7 am on a Saturday morning. You may know that your teenage self would look at the current you and think, Deeply uncool or, worse, cringe.
But this brings us to my final point. Remember the starfish.
I love a good cheesy moral story—the stuff that grandparents share on Facebook. This one, the starfish story, is a fan-favorite in the education world. What I mean by remember the starfish is that you do not have to be the cool adult to every teenager. I know that a handful of my students think I’m cool—maybe because I know who Hatsune Miku is, maybe because I’m not afraid to smile, maybe because I sought them out individually in some way—but a lot of them think I’m a loser or a hardass or an uncaring person or they simply do not have an opinion about me. And that’s okay. I am still a cool adult because I have been fully myself, and a few kids have connected with that.
In my church, we have a mentoring program. I didn’t really get it until the youth leader said, “Our goal is to have a constellation of caring adults surrounding the youth in our church.” That’s what we have to do, adults. We cannot hold all these teenagers and all their messy glory alone; we are just one star in a constellation. But there is a teenager out there who needs you in their lives—you and all your 7 am crossword/aerobic swimming exercise/old movie trivia glory. Don’t be afraid of them. They just want the true you.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
