"Why It's So Hard Being a Teenager"
by the Rev. Krista Taves
May 20, 2007
Reading
Credo by L.G.
A guy saves up for years and can finally afford a Mercedes with all the options. He wants to take care of it in every possible way so he goes to a priest and says, "Father, will you say a blessing over my Mercedes?" The priest says, "I'm sorry, I don't understand--what's a Mercedes?"
So he goes to a rabbi. Same thing: "I'm sorry--what's a Mercedes?"
So then he goes to a UU minister and says "Would you be willing to say a blessing over my Mercedes?" and the UU minister says, "I'm sorry, I don't understand--what's a blessing?"
Laughter? A pointless noun or a uniting spirit ... and what does laughter have to do with a coming of age belief statement. I think that when people laugh together something spiritual happens. When everyone was laughing at my joke earlier, it felt as if the entire community was one, we were all connected. When people laugh together, it feels to me like we are all one giant family, united and one. In some religions, God and Jesus bring people together. As a UU, I think otherwise. Humor is what I believe in. If I had walked in with a clown nose and big floppy feet, I bet people would have laughed and smiled. Laughter and humor brings people close together, even when they are completely opposite, even if they believe very different things. I remember always wanting to go to the circus when I was little, so I could laugh at the animals and people. I always feel better when someone cracks a funny joke, knowing that everything will be ok. I feel amazing and free whenever I laugh, like some sort of a spirit has come upon me and others around me. Laughter unites; I have often experienced God/Jesus/Alla/Budha as segregating forces.
As for humor at this church, some of my earliest memories were in R.E., when I was having a good time and laughing with friends. Earlier this year, when my friends asked what I was doing Saturday nights, I told them I had a class called OWL, which stands for Our Whole Lives. It is a sexuality education program. After explaining it to them, I always loved watching the expression on their faces. I always asked my mom what it meant to be UU, and she told me that I would figure it out one day. Well, today, I have figured it out for now. To be Unitarian, you must find something that you believe in. For me, its humor. Whether you are black, white, Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Unitarian, humor and laughter is a powerful and uniting spirit. It transcends all religions. It is something that everyone can relate to.
Whether you think God or Jesus bring people together, or something else, you probably agree that laughter is something we all can believe in. Growing up in this church, I was taught to be myself and to think and question what I believed. I am at my coming of age now, and as much as I complained about having to go to Sunday school, at least I know something I believe in…laughter. My uniting spirit. I have figured it out for myself…no one told me what it should be. Oh! By the way!
Q. How many Unitarians does it take to fix a light bulb?
A. None, the Unitarians accept the light bulb for who it is.
Message
Who could have ever expected what happened that afternoon at Leamington District Secondary School, June 1985. It was the last day of classes, the day our teachers let us know if we had to take our final exams. If your grade was B+ or higher, you were exempt. If your grade was lower than a B+, even by 1 percentage point, you had to take the exam for that class. We were coming upon the final hour of the day and I was, so far, exempt from every one of my exams. And then it was time to go to Mr. Vicker's Science Class.
I really really really didn't like Mr. Vicker. Mr. Vicker loved football, basketball, hockey, baseball, and most of all, he loved himself. And he loved to talk about himself, and football, basketball, hockey and baseball. The problem was, he did not like to talk about science. Every class he talked about everything but science, and then assigned us huge amounts of homework to make up for not teaching. It was terrible. Every night I'd try to do my homework, and end up crying. I had nightmares. My stomach hurt all the time. It didn't help that Mr. Vicker didn't like me. I had been selected for enriched Math and English and Mr. Vicker told the rest of the class that he didn't believe in spoiling smart kids and he felt it his personal duty to make sure that didn't happen. To put it mildly, I was terrified of him.
One day, while he was going on about his amazing coaching career, I got so frustrated that I timidly raised my hand and said as politely as I could, "I see from our textbook that we are learning about hypothesizing skills today." It made no difference. Another time he was blabbing on about the senior football team back in 1962, and someone hit him between the eyes with a spitball. He made everyone stay for detention and lectured us about the dangers of flying objects. To make his point he explained how to calculate velocity and impact. It was the closest thing to science I'd heard all year!
My dad was furious. Tired of seeing me cry over my homework and frustrated at having to drop everything and make the long drive into town to pick me up, he went to visit Mr. Vicker and gave him a piece of his mind. And while I really wanted to see Mr. Vicker get what was coming to him, I was also scared, because he was still my teacher.
When you're in school, you really are vulnerable to your teachers. It's easy for those of us who aren't in school to remember this, but when you're in school, your teacher rules the roost. If you have a good teacher, being in that classroom is a great thing. You feel good about yourself, you feel good about what you learn, and the time flies. But if you have a bad teacher, class becomes something you have to endure, day after day after day. You can try to fix the situation, maybe by complaining to the principal, but what if they don't believe you? There's always the suspicion that kids blow things out of proportion or are trying to get even with a teacher. So if you complain, and they don't do anything, you might get that teacher mad at you, and it can become even worse. Not to mention that your friends could tease you about being a browner, because while everyone wants really good grades, it's not cool to look like you really want good grades.
The next day, Mr. Vicker called me to the front of the room. "Listen Taves," he said, "your dad's way out of line, but it's your lucky day. I'm not gonna take it out on you, but I'm telling you, you better work your butt off." For the rest of the term, I worked really hard. I didn't want to give Mr. Vicker any reason to give me a hard time. And it seemed to be working. Every assignment came back an A- or an A. When I calculated all my marks, I knew I was getting a B+. But on that last day, I had a bad feeling. I walked into Mr. Vicker's class and found out that he gave me a B-. He had lied to me. He was punishing me for what my dad said to him.
This is the last sermon in our Youth Pew series. Once a month, I preach on a sermon topic that the youth choose for me, and for today you asked me to preach on how difficult it is to be a teenager. Because it's been almost twenty years since I was a teenager, I decided to ask you exactly what you had in mind because I didn't want to assume. And what you had to say was very revealing.
At the top of your list was the pressure to succeed at school while balancing everything else in your life, like sports, family, friends and a job. Second on the list was concern about the future. You are very concerned that the choices you make today will affect what you can do when you are adults. Will you choose the right courses. Will you get into the school of your choice. How much debt are you going to accumulate? When you graduate college will your skills get you good careers so you can pay that debt and establish a good life for yourselves.
Along with all the pressure to succeed and worry about the future was the emotional drama of being a teenager - watching your body change, peer pressure, and dating. And when you put all these three together, as one young woman said to me: "I don't like being a teenager. It's the hardest time of your life. There are so many new things and they all happen at once. And if you don't have your priorities right as a teenager, the rest of your life will be difficult. Every decision you make is going to follow you for the rest of your life." I got the sense from some of you that you just wished this time was over so you could get into your adult life and get on with it
What you shared really affected me, more than I though it would, and I've found myself wondering since then what it's like to live with all that pressure and if there is another way. And I tried to remember if I felt that same pressure when I was a teenager. Have all teenagers through time felt the same kind of pressure that you do, or is this something unique to your generation? And I think it's a both/and.
Some of what you're going through is pretty normal for all teenagers. Our bodies are changing, our ideas are changing, there is more responsibility, there is more pressure. We're getting ready for adult life. So on one level everyone has had the feelings you are having now.
But every generation is also special in some way. We are deeply affected by what is going in on the world around us. If you meet someone who saves everything, right down to twist ties, they were likely a teenager during the Great Depression in the 1930s, when many people were very very poor. They faced the pressures of not having enough. Most babyboomers, those are the kids born after 1945, had tonnes of opportunity. They are less likely to save twist ties and more likely to stock up on credit cards. Their pressure focuses on finding meaning in an increasingly complex world. Generation Xers like me are a mix of the two. We had a big recession that lasted until 1982, but then the economy was really really strong in the late 1980s, but when we started college in the 1990s, the economy fell again. So my generation is both cautious and optimistic about the future. Our challenge was to accept that we weren't going to have the same opportunities as our parents.
So what makes your generation different? Well, a big part of it is the challenges you are facing in what we call a post-industrial economy. Since the 1990s, we started seeing a lot of factories move to the developing world and with that came big job losses, both for factory workers and middle class workers. Add to that the fact that China and India are about to economically overtake the United States, and we are finding ourselves in an uncertain and vulnerable position. We are not going to be top dog for long. And that means that our economy is in flux and we don't know what is going to happen. What we do know is that the future lies in technology and innovation. But other than that, we're all pretty uncertain about how we will handle this new post-industrial order. And one of the areas most affected by our uncertainty is education.
We're looking more and more to education as the place to prepare us for this uncertain future. We have moved from education that emphasizes character building, to education that emphasizes the skills we think we're going to need to stay competitive in the new world order Part of this shift is the result of the anxiety adults feel about what kind of future you will have. We do know that educational standards fell from the 1970s on, and that the quality of education decreased. In our anxiety and worry about the future, we have created higher and higher standards to try and fix the situation. This is reflected most clearly in standardized testing. As you have probably experienced, you are tested at younger and younger ages, and grades have become more and more important, seen as prime indicators for how well we are doing at preparing you for the world out there. And because we are focusing so much on grades, a lot of pressure is put on you to succeed. Given the importance placed on grades, I have no doubt that you're getting the impression that any mistake you make now is going to haunt you for the rest of your life and that your grades now are going to determine your success as an adult. In this way, I think the pressure you face is unique. I don't think that my generation, your parents' generation, or your grandparents' generation faced the kind of pressure that you face today.
And something in me is really really uncomfortable with that. I am worried that we have taken our focus on grades too far. What does it do to your self-esteem when your value is constantly measured by your grades? I wonder what it does to a person's spirit when you are taught that every little choice is going to have huge consequences for your future. Doesn't that put a lot of fear in you? And what is it like to live with that fear day after day? How can you make true choices, choices that are really about who you are, when you're always afraid and the only way you are taught to measure the worth of something is through a grade?
Last year, I preached a sermon to the adults about how we value ourselves. In that sermon I challenged the idea that our value as human beings is measured by our accomplishments. We are in a society that measures us by what we accomplish, and so we rush rush rush and work work work through our lives, trying to accomplish all kinds of things to prove to ourselves and everyone else, that we are valuable people. If we feel productive, we feel good about ourselves. If we don't feel productive we judge ourselves for not being enough. We confuse accomplishments with happiness.
I am concerned that our emphasis on grades is training you to do that. I am concerned that no one is ever allowed to make mistakes anymore. I am concerned that what we want is guaranteed certainty and guaranteed results. And I'm concerned that the more we struggle for guarantees of anything, the more unhappy and anxious we will become. The harder we try, the more pressure all of us feel and the more likely we are to make choices that are nothing about who we really are, deep down inside, and everything about keeping away fear and uncertainty. There is a price to be paid for that. That price is the loss of freedom. Freedom for ourselves. Freedom for others. Freedom for our hearts. Freedom for our minds. Freedom for our souls.
When Mr. Vicker gave me that B-, suddenly, I didn't care anymore if he liked me. He had done the worst thing he could to me, and that meant I had nothing to lose. I walked up to him and said "You promised me you would not punish me for my father, and this grade proves you lied. You have wasted a whole year of my time. You have insulted me and you insulted everyone in this class because you haven't taught us a thing. You should stop talking about your football days and start teaching science."
You could have heard a pin drop. Everybody just stared at me. One kid at the back of the class gave me a thumbs up, but I knew they were all as scared of him as I was. I left the room in tears and called my parents. I figured there was nothing else I could do. I had told off my teacher. I was definitely going to have to write that exam. But within hours my parents and I were in the vice-principal's office, and soon I got my real grade, B+.
Grades are important, but they are not everything. What is important is your self-esteem, your self-value, and your self-respect. You should work hard at school, because a good education is very important. And good grades will open doors for you. But getting everything perfect the first time is not the point. Making the exact right decisions now is not the point. Living true to who you are is.
You have your whole life to make decisions and most of you will, just like the generations before you, change in who you are and what you want. You could change majors, change colleges, change careers, change your mind. You have your whole life to figure out what you are meant to do. The questions you are asking yourselves now are going to be questions you are going to ask yourself all your life. Everyone in this room, including me, is still wondering what they're going to be when they grow up. Your inherent worth and value has nothing to do with your grades, nothing to do with making perfect decisions, and everything to do with who you really are, deep down inside, with your private thoughts, with your big questions, even with your big worries and your big fears. Even when you are low and depressed, even when you are confused and anxious, and feel like nothing is going right, you are in your deepest being, holy and sacred and tremendously worthy of being loved and cherished and treasured.
The reason we have rites of passage, like child dedications, nursery graduations, and coming of age, is so that we remind ourselves over and over again, that the most sacred and holy gift we can give to each other is to value who we are at the deepest level. And no matter your grades, and no matter how many mistakes you make, and no matter whether you are happy or depressed, we never ever stop loving you.
I think L. said it best. "How many Unitarians does it take to fix a light bulb? None, we accept the light bulb for who it is."
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Send Questions or Comments to Rev. Taves: Minister@EmersonUUChapel.org
Updated: 06/25/07