I was inching through traffic in D.C. the other day, and to give my vocal chords a break from singing, I turned on the radio to listen to DC101.1. Elliot in the Morning, a crazy morning radio show host who delivers an equally crazy but hilarious show, makes my desire to monster-truck over the bumper-to-bumper traffic slowly cease which is always a good thing.

Eliot's topics of choice are usually crude and sometimes disgusting, making any moral person contemplate selling their soul to the devil to join in on the fun - after the initial shock you come to terms with the fact that this guy is really funny. I tuned in half-way through a discussion about teachers putting up with horrible students in the classroom.

There were several callers representing most of the greater D.C.-area who all had scary student stories. The majority of the callers were teachers, complaining about how their students cuss them out and do whatever they want because they know the teachers can't enforce any type of corporal punishment. Their stories, although quite humorous to listen to at first, did make me realize how depressing that is - when I was in school we all chuckled at a student's lame attempt to smart-mouth a teacher, but now thinking of the great extent of profanity and crazy activity of students I hear about, I'm getting kind of scared for the future generation of kids that go through our educational system in the country in general.

One of the callers on Elliot's radio show was a 13-year old boy who said that one day in class his teacher told him to flip his t-shirt inside-out because it had a picture of a girl in a bikini on it. He called his teacher something equivalent to a cow with the f-bomb dropped in. She proceeded to say to him, "boy, I will [mess] you up!" - the teacher not only threatened him but dropped the f-bomb right back. Elliot from the radio show was very pleased to hear of a teacher fighting back for once, even if it did involve swearing at a student (as well as threatening them). The teacher's attitude seemed to do the trick - the teen caller admitted that once he heard that, he immediately cleaned up his act and gave the teacher no trouble.

Here's what I don't understand - why a teacher would be led to that in the first place. Imagine how much other crap she (yes, it was a female teacher) had to put up with to get to that breaking point. I'm certainly not condoning a teacher acting so foully, but I certainly do support a teacher taking a stand and forcing a child to pull rank in a reasonable manner.   None of my teachers in high school or middle school would ever take more than 1.2-seconds of a kid acting up before that student was gone from the room - it simply was not tolerated.  What has happened to teachers that their authority and power in the classroom has turned into a joke?

When I was in high school, no one ever dared to push a teacher's buttons much farther than the occasional class-clown act out. Being a youth leader these past few years has unfortunately opened my eyes to the frightening stories about what is currently going on in high schools. Almost all college students (that haven't been out of high school too long) say that we have absolutely no idea the extent of current high school students' activities - from drugs and alcohol to sexual activity and profanity. Depending on you're from I understand that at one point or another any person that has walked into a high school has experienced one of these issues to varying degrees.  However, return to your high school alma mater today and I can guarantee that the extent to which these issues are visible has gone up about 300% - and it's still growing.

However, if kids today are so much worse than we were back in the day that you and me were in high school, why are vital statistics, like teen drug use, sexual activity, pregnancy, and birth rates, decreasing? Maybe it's because even though the activities are statistically going down, kid's mouths are running a mile a minute on these once-taboo subjects. Even though I know I never would have been in a classroom situation like Eliot's 13-year old caller was in, I am smart enough to know that the majority of my classmates had a bad potty mouth - it just  wasn't directed at the teacher. That doesn't make my graduating class any better than the current. Now, it's at the point that a teacher swearing back a student isn't so shocking to the students; in fact, it unfortunately does the equivalent to what a trip to the office would do for my class (or a good paddling would do for my parent's class).

Any person you talk to - whether they've been out of high school for one year or forty - will tell you how much our youth is going down the societal drain. I can never argue against the value of investing in our nation's youth to attempt to have a successful future - however, the one thing kids need to know today is to keep their mouth shut. I think the verbalization of these events are making us look worse than we really are.  Just by going on word-of-mouth, you would think that every teenager you meet is a doped up, vulgar sex fiend with no care about anything. 

But the facts tell a different story.  Look, kids are kids, no matter is they're 12 or 20.  What's every young person's goal (whether they admit it or not)? To be cool - and to be cool, you must act "older" and "mature" for your age.  Maybe it's not the teens fault that their perspection of what makes you adult and mature is false - maybe it's the people that aren't teens that these kids are looking up to - aka you and me. 

Every generation has gone through the same adolescent issues that our current youth face, but this is the first generation that has been completely open with what has usually been going on behind the scenes. If anything, maybe this will give an opportunity for the people that have been in denial that this type of behavior occurs to try to finally put an end to this on-going foul behavior in our nation's youth.  Unfortunately, all I see it doing as of now is to give adults (both young and old) to complain about kids more than they have to.