Dear Grown-ups... Sincerely, Gen Z | Kimber Lybbert | TEDxSpokane

[Music] so two and a half years ago I took a group of high school students to one of those leadership camps where the director asked them to climb a 30-foot pole and stand upright on the top of it at this point the only thing between them and disaster was the collective grip of their classmates on the other end of the rope this rope was attached to a pulley located yards away from the pole and lower than the top of it so that when a student fell or triumphantly left off at the end of their climb they would actually enter a state of freefall before if I went as planned the Rope tightened up and their classmates lowered them to the ground many of my students succeeded at this some of them froze halfway up the pole and had to be rescued one girl wouldn't even touch the safety harness and on the inside I was like girlfriend I hear you this is a solid life choice right now because I don't even change my own light bulbs but on the outside I was big chillin like dude that's only 30 feet off the ground and look if you lose your balance there's teenagers on the other end of your life line you can do this now I don't know how many of you are parents or teachers but if so you know that teenagers have this finely honed sense this like six cents for hypocrisy it turns out the first twenty eight feet aren't that difficult I mean there's a pole to hold on to and there's these little metal spiky things for your feet that hardly ever fall off but when I got to the top where I was supposed to stand on a swaying pole not even large enough for both of my feet I honestly didn't think I had it in me and as I crouched there looking down at all of those upturned faces many of them tears streaked from their own attempts all of the lectures that I've given on grit and perseverance came back to haunt me in the video I think you can see me for like seven minutes and the pole is shuttering and the students are shouting Liberty you got this and we promise if you pee your pants will delete the video when I finally stood upright thirty feet below me a dozen teenagers held my life in their sweaty grip and when I fell they caught me I tell you this story today because I'm here on assignment from these young people they have assigned me to come here and invite you to disenthrall yourselves to invite us as adults to disenthrall ourselves from our own preconceptions about who teenagers are or should be and set aside judgment as we explore our shared humanity with him side by side with open minds and whole hearts now as a teacher understand that setting aside judgement when it comes to teenagers that's tough and as a mother of six well I'll match you story for story in fact let's start with mother child texting moments did about a month ago my 16 year old sent me this this happened but my favorite my favorite parent-child texting moment of all times it's happened on Mother's Day a few years ago I was sitting at church between two sweet ladies with delicate sensitivities when one of my son's texted me except clearly he thought he was texting his girlfriend here's how it went down [Applause] yeah so the truth is I have until now I have never mentioned this text to anyone and not primarily out of respect for my son's privacy either when I saw this I'd like to all sorts of judgments about him and me as a parent and I was ashamed I was also fundamentally wrong not in my silence about this error but in my motivation for concealing it for imagining that it carried with it some degree of condemnation for him or me because the upward trajectory of human progress has always been characterized by iterative and incremental returning from error not relentless perfection if this is the face of error then maybe this is the face of redemption and I when I say Redemption I don't mean redemption on like some cosmic or eternal scale I mean on a much more personal and individual level where we allow ourselves and others to move forward acknowledging error without recoiling from one another where we look past flaws and imperfections to the elemental soul of the creature in front of us teenagers make mistakes that bewilder us every day they regularly confound our best-laid lesson plans and break our hearts but regardless of all this emotional and circumstantial chaos I wholeheartedly believe that if we are not in awe of these young people before us we're not really seeing them Carl Sandburg tells a story of a farmer who had difficulty understanding his son's true potential the way was huge he could carry a 600 pound corn crib across the field on his back he could with one hand lift a fully grown pig by its hind legs clear the ground if he applied himself he could have been the most successful farmer in Illinois but instead all he wanted to do was read and daydream I said of bending his back to the plow he'd stare off into the distance corn crop forgotten and ask unanswerable questions like dad who do you think has more reason to complain the Indian or the Negro I can just imagine this poor father's response Oh for the love can we leave politics to the politicians and stop talking about slavery you're 17 what are you gonna do about it issue a proclamation wage a war you and what army let's be realistic about your future Abraham I don't know like shave no one's gonna take you seriously with facial hair right it's always been difficult to perceive our children clearly through the generation gap but I bet you it's even harder to understand how they see us back which is why when a presenter at a staff meeting dared us to seek feedback directly from the people we care most about I sent one of my children this question what do you think that I could do better in our relationship his first response was idk but clearly he did because that was quickly followed by not question my abilities and I was like I don't do that besides what does the 15 you all know about parenting so of course my denial was quickly followed by the realization that I do doubt him a lot I mean once you've taken a kid to get Legos surgically removed from his sinus cavity a couple of times you start to wonder but my son isn't asking me to completely ignore his shortcomings he's asking me to view him as a capable fellow human who explores the world differently than I and yeah sometimes to foot the bill for those explorations because curiosity is frequently messy even in spite of all this like inconvenience and expenses it's hard to understand that our children are not substandard versions of ourselves but unpracticed does not equate with unworthy especially when we are inundated by cynicism in the popular media about the capabilities of our young people search any news cycle and you'll find headlines that set up negative outliers as a standard for an entire generation Edgar Lee masters called the P of young people of his day degenerate sons and daughters Forbes magazine more recently labeled them a generation of sissies and while I understand the frustration behind these sentiments I fundamentally disagree our children are not degenerate our 15 year old boys they didn't invent pornography our 17 year old daughters didn't mass-market unattainable body images and if suicide attempts have doubled among young people in recent years it is not because they were born degenerate because they were born into a world they reject we need to ask ourselves why are they accountable for their choices absolutely you decide to pierce your tongue at the sand dunes with a penknife that abscess girlfriend that's gonna take some serious antibiotics hot cheetos are off the menu but all of their afflictions are not self-inflicted Anthony didn't write the healthcare policies that show that compel him to choose between my English class and working 60 hours a week to care for ill and underinsured family members Mandy did not put that gun in her mother's mouth Alex didn't ask for gender confusion we cannot continue to break up our hearts against the young people who disappoint us mistaken contempt for tough love we must not cry weak when they cry help we cannot write off as a tension seeking those who are simply lost for direction please don't tell me my students are lazy cowardly or soft unless you want to sit down and talk about how you plan to strengthen them and when they fail let's get down with the dust of the arena with them and examine the skid marks and listen to their plan of attack for the next attempt I don't worry that we won't have all the answers you don't have to be an expert last year Johns Hopkins published a meta-analysis of 78 large-scale randomized studies of math interventions examining what does and does not work to raise math scores and it might seem obvious to you that of all the factors they examined only one-on-one tutoring made a significant difference it's the only one but what might surprise you is that those tutors didn't need to understand math they didn't even need a college diploma what seemed to matter was an adult human looking a child in the eye with the expectation that forward motion for that student was possible the same thing has been found to be true of reading interventions the truth is we don't have to fully understand our teenagers or their world we do have to look them in the eye and replace suspicion with curiosity but as any teenager to tell you there's a world of difference between a conversation and an interrogation try this the next time your teenager or any teenager young person you know does something who you think comes from a place of defiance irresponsibility or laziness imagine for a moment that she did the best she could with the resources available to her and then temporarily remove all question words from you know vocabulary all of them I want you to focus on this phrase instead tell me about so think of the difference between a conversation that begins where have you been or why are you late and you're home tell me about your day or a conversation that kicks off with what were you thinking and dude that is an epic ticket tell me about it because here's the thing he already knows he screwed up he's already approaching this conversation terrified and humiliated there is zero chance that by responding with curiosity you risk your son believing you want him to navigate backwards through the Burger King drive-through going 30 miles an hour again tomorrow zero we can still build him for damages we can still revoke driving privileges but we must not do is revoke his self-respect because in the last five years we have seen a breathtaking increase of student capacity at the same time as an equally heart-stopping atrophy of their confidence not every kid has enough bravado to say hey mom knock it off stop doubting my abilities stop flinching at the approach of challenges instead many of our young people are not only flinching they're freezing up completely a few years ago we had a student I'll call Miguel he worked incredibly hard he came from a difficult that family background he blamed himself for circumstances that no 15 year old in history has ever been responsible for and he worked so hard with ever out ever feeling like he fully measured up one day in class we were talking about the relative merits of revenge so half the students were like openly advocating for offensive maneuvers against the enemy and the rest were like let's turn the other cheek right and Miguel put up his hand and he said guys here's what I can't figure out why is it that when someone makes me laugh I don't feel like I have to make him laugh in return eyes laugh so why is it that when someone hurts me I feel like I have to hurt him back this is deep stuff right this insight transformed all of my relationships and it came from a 15 year old boy who shortly after this conversation cut off all contact with his fears he lost interest in all of the things he loved most and ultimately never returned to us if I stand up here today is because my knees are too arthritic to kneel and if you hear any condemnation in my voice it is all self directed because it has been years since Miguel and Anthony and Alex walked through my door but every day when I take role I wonder how their stories might have ended differently if I had done more simply mark the mAb --scent I wonder how many other brilliant ideas did they have here about I asked my students what they would tell you today if they could be here in my place and the vast majority of their 265 comments contain outright pleas from your young people to be fully heard and seen by the adults in their lives they're intensely aware of our indifference and they're writhing under the weight of it our teenagers do not need more likes they need the flesh and blood humans they admire most you and I to take them seriously but while many of us have passed on global ideologies like the value of hard work and equality in too many instances I fear that we have failed I have failed to look individual humans in the eye take them by the hand and reassure them that they are of immeasurable worth that there is no mistake or life circumstance from which they cannot recover their ideas matter that we trust them with our collective future in less than a year many of them will be going to the ballot boxes 5 to 10 they will be building your homes and filling your prescriptions give them a couple more and they will be cracking open your sternum to run a bypass through your failing heart this is the generation that holds our lives in their hands and the strength of that grip when you and I reach the ends of our rope might enlarge start be determined by how much Trust we choose to bestow upon them today I wish I could share with you all of their ideas I said I'm just gonna read these three you might think we're too young to make a difference or that we don't understand what's really going on in the world but listen we might surprise you after all I get this 17 year old girl wrote this and ideas should not be invalidated by the age of its creator you can't treat us like infants and expect us to act like adults let us fail sometimes without freaking out we're gonna figure it out we need security we're scared about the future we feel like the older generation doesn't trust us we don't know if we trust ourselves these are fantastic humans they're smarter and kinder and more creative than we ever were yeah some of them are broken but they are also patched together in ways that allow the best light of humanity to shine through them and if that light is muted maybe it's because it is cloaked behind layers of adult manufactured issues let's draw back the curtain and see our children for who they truly are and who they have the potential to become let's embrace what we see and not flinch thank you [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 776,007

Rating: 4.9799137 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Hope, Students, Teaching, Youth

Id: P0xIoUhzpvA

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020

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