Valerie Hill: Give kids a chance – most deserve it

May 30 2008 by Valerie Hill, Liverpool Daily Post

OVER the last few weeks, we have read of some horrific crimes against innocent youngsters doing nothing more than going out and about enjoying themselves in their local area.

We have heard from their grieving families and seen the requisite floral shrines spring up in unlikely locations.

Yet recent headline tragedies involving young people seem to have given the rest of the teenage population the same bad name. Yes, there are some youth offenders who are just as that term describes them – they are criminals, not merely the euphemistically labelled “scallies” as they tend to be called in this region.

But what about the rest of the younger generation? The millions of 13-18 year-olds who every day go to school or college, work reasonably hard, try to do a little good in the world, and might even smile at their mums and empty the dishwasher before they go to bed.

Because this amorphous body make up most of today’s typical teenagers. And I don’t say this as a smiling bystander (I have taught in comprehensive schools for 25 years) nor as the worst kind of self-righteous “I know these kids” social worker.

It’s just that I’ve spent the majority of my waking hours since 1983 in the company of young people who can by turns be funny and delightful, then equally infuriating and unreliable.

In short, just like you and me and the rest of the human race.

Because when adults criticise teenagers, they very often think that they once were, or still are, paragons of virtue and that today’s crop fall far short of the impeccable standards reached by themselves in the seventies, sixties, fifties or whatever.

False memory syndrome kicks in and they forget the cheek they gave to their parents, the experimenting with under-age drinking, or giving a false age to buy cigarettes.

Goodness me, according to her recent book, even Cherie Blair was no saint as a Crosby teenager 40 years ago.

In short, all kids are hard-wired to push boundaries. And I’m not commenting on this situation through rose-tinted spectacles. I have two lads of my own who regularly try my patience endeavouring to beat the land-speed record (slowest ever recorded result) in first getting into, then out of, bed.

On the rare occasions I ask one of them to make me a cup of tea, I have to draw a route map to the kitchen and they both live in that blissful, dream-like state of believing in the bin-bag fairy and Dobby the house-cleaning elf.

Most of the time, they exist in a parallel universe plugged in to i-Pods, X-Boxes and MSN. Out of desperation, I’m currently perfecting the art of sign language, but I’m having a little difficulty with the pluperfect and the subjunctive.

True, they are not spending their evenings shoving broken beer bottles into people’s faces – but then neither are the majority of today’s young people. It could be argued that these stories involving violent crime make the headlines because they still are relatively rare and therefore newsworthy.

Rather, my sons see their job as keeping me in order, with comments such as: “You’re not going to work dressed like that, are you?”

I guess they are anticipating the scorn heaped upon their own teachers who might appear clothed in green tights or leopard print accessories. If I had daughters, I suppose I would be told, uninvited, that my bum did look big in whatever tight, loose, clingy, stretchy or tent-like garment I had on.

But again, I have never experienced personal insults or verbal attacks in the classroom, and I’ve hardly worked in the leafy suburbs.

True, when I first started teaching, my nickname was Sindy (because I had so many outfits) and now apparently it has morphed into Hyacinth Bouquet – due to the fact that I told a top set, who really should know better, that I hadn’t been into a chip shop since 1983.

This fuelled their belief that I lived on slices of quince and quails’ eggs. (It had followed a question about Al Capone which one bright spark truly believed was the name of a kebab shop in Wigan).

Because adolescents can be charmingly innocent. Many of them suffer from irony deficiencies. One recently told me, apropos of nothing, that I looked “like that woman off Britain’s Most Haunted.” She must be good-looking, I joked.

“Erm, hmm, not really,” came the guileless reply.

Priceless – honest and straightforward, as are most of our young people.

They are the future. Give them a chance.