To Quote A Certain Animated Lion, “Be Prepared!”

I completed my student teaching in 2018. I was assigned a ninth-grade geography class at a school in a rough area. The students were not super motivated to do their school work, and many of them were several assignments behind in all of their classes.

They were mostly fourteen and fifteen years old, old enough to be aware of the state of the world and tensions between our country and others. Occasionally, I would ask a student why they had not completed an assignment, and the student would respond with something like, “Nuclear war is inevitable. We’ll all be dead by 2020. There’s no point in doing school work since we won’t live long enough to go to college.”

At the time, I was showing a student news segment each day. Usually, the kids ignored the news, but one day, the host was talking about the President of the United States meeting with the leader of a certain Asian country in person. This was interesting to the kids, and after the news ended, one of them raised their hand.

Student: “Miss, does this mean we won’t be going to war in the immediate future?”

Me: “It doesn’t look like it.”

Student: “Dang it! I guess I should ask my English teacher for an extension on that essay I was supposed to turn in today. If I’m going to be alive for graduation, I should probably make sure I actually graduate.”

I am writing this in 2022, so clearly, we haven’t all perished. I hope he and my other students were able to raise their grades in all their classes. Things may still not be great as far as our relationships with other countries, but refusing to prepare for any sort of future isn’t the way to live. If anyone reading this is still in school, please keep your grades up, just in case.