Addressing Assumptions about Adolescents in a Preservice YAL Course

in fact very few, of the students I encountered while teaching middle and high school were the devils my peers might think, despite the pervasive rhetoric. Perhaps one might call me too optimistic about adolescents, since I hold the assumption that all teenagers can succeed and learn to love English language arts. However, if this is a flaw, I am happy to be guilty as charged. I am not naïve, though; I do know that some of my former students struggled in school, displayed inappropriate behaviors, or quite honestly were rude. However, I have always found the traits of my middle and high school students to be typical of humans, and not just of the adolescent variety. It is easy to say that teens are rude or apathetic, but I have met an equal number of adults who exhibit those traits. Part of the reason I have been and will continue to be adamant that the deficit view of teens is misinformed has to do with my own adolescent experience. Anyone who knew me as a teenager could attest to the fact that I was smart, conscientious, kind, hard working, and respectful of others. My story of being a teenager is not the one that is told in conversations among peers or shown in the media. There is a range of and diversity within adolescent experiences. Although I wasn’t exposed to young adult literature as an adolescent, as a middle and high school English teacher, I began to get to know the genre and F or anyone who has ever taught teenagers, there is a strong temptation to congeal their quirky traits into one lump of coal. I say coal because our understanding of adolescents is usually filled with negative attributes of the unruly, rebellious, lazy sort. We seem to think teenagers belong on the proverbial “naughty” list. This deficit view around adolescents— one in which teens are perceived as being deficient or inherently flawed and in need of more knowledgeable others to guide them and/or lift them out of this incomplete and negative hole—is a too-prevalent theme discussed by adults and, more specifically and problematically, by teachers. As though an mp3 stuck on repeat on our iPhones, this single story about “typical” teens is hard to turn off. And as Chimamanda Adichie (2009) warns us in her TED talk, single stories are dangerous; they create “stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” Throughout my career as an educator, I have heard this single story of young adults many times. Well-intentioned friends have even joked about or bluntly asked me why on earth I would want to teach middle or high school students, and they conclude that I must have been a saint to do so. I can guarantee that I am no saint, just as I can guarantee that not all, “I thought you were just typical teenagers.” “No one has ever called me typical. I can’t say I like it.” —Sarah Nicolas, 2015, p. 158