Responsibility? What is That?

I am not an old teacher.  But I will admit, I'm getting a little bit cranky.

The small things are getting to me, such as having to collect laptop cords that children have left lying around the school.  But really this isn't a such a small thing... Jim Power recently addressed the boys at UCC's venerable Laidlaw Hall with the following suggestion:


"I know that adolescence can be a sloppy stage of life, but can I ask you to do me a favour:  at least when you are at school, I’d like you to go out of your way to pick up after yourselves. For example, when lunch is ending in the Student Centre, remember to throw your trash away. It says all the wrong things if you go Tom and Daisy on us and let other people, especially those considered lower on the ladder, clean up the mess. That sort of blind carelessness reinforces all the wrong things."


This 'carelessness' from students is, from my perspective, somewhat new.  It was only eight years ago, as a first year teacher, that I saw a student kneel on his knees and individually try to remove fifty black scuff marks from the floor left accidently by boys in dress shoes excitedly leaving an assembly.  He realized that the janitor would be left to do the work and, without anyone telling him to do it or me ever telling him that I saw him do it (for that would have ruined the moment) he wanted to be part of the solution.

So, are children today less caring then they were eight years ago?  Are they unable to see beyond their own piece of the world?  (It is true that our main instruction to adolescent boys on a field trip to Washington that same first year of my career was "share your world"...)  I don't think so.  Rather, children today are given even less opportunity than those of eight years ago, and certainly bucket-loads less opportunity than those of two decades ago, to actually exercise a level of responsibility and decision making that has an impact.

Let's start with their leisure time.  With an ever-increasing amount devoted to electronic screens (see my now 2.5 year old post on the subject here) the opportunity to be out in the world, where actions bring about reactions and inaction does just as much, are severely diminished.  Something so simple as playing in a local stream and damming it up shows a child that they have an impact on the world.  Similarly, planting seeds in a garden and then leaving them untended shows them that their inaction also impacts the world (as I allowed a great number of my fourth graders to find out this year).  Even communication, the face to face type which has long been jettisoned in favour of Snapchat and texting, brought about give and take and taught you to be careful about what you say (the impact of your words was instantaneously recognizable on your friends' faces... not so with communication via electronic mediums).  Where, in a world of screens, do our children learn responsibility?

I don't even want to go in to how school has failed to teach responsibility.  Let's just put it this way - if you never get to make a decision (even one so small as when to go to the bathroom) how will you ever begin to understand the consequences of your decisions?  And if failure is not a true option, how will you know how that feels?  The answers are obvious - you simply won't.

There are not easy answers.  And perhaps this is just the ranting of an increasingly older and increasingly grumpier man.  But one thing is for certain - there will be some dead batteries and thus unusable laptops in my classroom next week.