Caring about now.

“Mr. ‘Teacher.’ When are you going to realize that everything you do up there, every rule and punctuation mark and smile and assignment will be completely gone in under four years? Can you quote any of your high school teachers? Weren’t you finding reasons to be on your phone? What you do makes no impact on any of us and you won’t make it past 22- you’re like the supplies for a birthday party. We need you to not make a mess, but nobody really notices that you’re there and it’s a hassle to put you in the trash after everyone has used you. You’ll have a lot fewer arguments with kids when you see that, then you’ll be more like some of our nicer teachers who let us do what we want.”

Well I can't really argue with astute analogies, but piecing this apart may make me smile in small parts. I realized the outcome of disconnection and outcome of teenagers not caring when I taught in a district that had given the kids exactly what they wanted. It was sad to see students reprimanded for headphone infractions and holding hands like they were children, and then expect them to leave their school day for adulthood and not sound ignorant or childish for not being reminded of the rules or for not being praised for anything in their lives. There's a large shift between secondary schooling and the real world, and it's that people who don't know your middle name don't give a cuss word about you. No one is left to ask how your game went, or to comment on your haircut because they see you every day, or to help you feel good about doing anything selfless for anyone for any reason. No one cares if you play a sport or volunteer when you're an adult; you're just expected to find that sense of inner pride when you finish something, when no one taught you how to have that at any point of your life. 
That's fine to forget or block certain things out, but high schools were meant to teach you 'how' to think, not 'what,' and a lot of districts and subdivisions and statistics forgot that. Each generation complains about the latest one being lazier, greedier, and more self-deserving, when it's the oldest generation who passes it down by trying to slap band-aids on losing playoff games and not getting away with cheating on assignments- if you don't do the work you should be faced with the idea that you suck at something. Feel bad. Feel lazy. Realize that someone is better, and then work harder. Quitting is not what made four and a half good Rocky movies. The adults who prepare the kids- who will be adults and pass their lessons to kids- seem to lose that transference of care. Yes someone cares about you as a child, but you need to learn to care for yourself before you become an adult so that you don't sound like a child when a mechanic calls with the wrong estimate or you need to email someone who is understandably mistaken about an issue that neither party should care about- it's just track lighting.  But this cycle of passing children like buckets of water gets those kids to the end of the line, and they only know how to pass buckets as well. 
It's funny that you mention me being used because that's exactly what I did to people when I was your age, and I have a much longer list of people I wish I was friends with than actual friends, who are the deepest friends, since they somehow saw past me being a selfish symbol of my entire age group. I don't want the same regret for any of you-which is why I encourage meeting everybody-because adults hate meeting each other for any reason except food. You have the opportunity to make eye contact with hundreds of people every day, and I wish adults had that; we spend more than 50% of our days looking at screens and wondering why it's hard to make eye contact with one or two people we aren't familiar with. The chain of judgement and awkward silence has gotten too wide for us and it feels safer to sit on a couch that has never judged us, making comments to a less-than-tangible webpage which always helps us fix our grammar mistakes and none of our moral mistakes. The whole technology issue is another ironic post, and I'll let this medium sink in. 
As for words and assignments, no matter what subject you teach, even knot tying or singing on key, synapses work in funny ways that connect songs on the radio to a book you read over ten years ago, which reminds you of your brother who played that CD way too much, which reminds you of breaking the speaker in the backseat, which reminds you of one of the longest road trips to see family, which reminds you of one of the shortest 6 hour drives to Florida you didn't know you'd want to hold onto because it was the longest time you spend discussing the road with your father. Everything is connected to everything, and it's that obscure sense of fate that one day you'll see the same word In a book I told you to read over winter break that you got to ten winter breaks too late, but it reminds you of a memory you've wanted to tell your daughter for years and didn't know where it was waiting for you. The assignments I put on you get put on your soul, and if you take your cuss word headphones out for long enough, you'll hear the future and might come to understand what hard work is before it's 2 AM and you're out of ideas on how to restart your computer to print a paper for a class you spent a thousand dollars on. 
I want you to experience twice the memories that I've hinted at, but I want you to be able to experience them fully, without repose, and without needing to reach for a camera phone or media outlet to share it with people who will literally scroll past your accomplishments. But I want you to be able to adequately and eloquently be able to describe half of those memories to people who might make eye contact with you, and might need that specific word to get them halfway to the feeling that you had when you saw the sunset after your last high school practice. You'll need those words for speeches you didn't know you had to make decades from now. 
Even though I realized that the current is too strong to stand up in, I'll anchor a stick into the rocks until I can't, and see what gets snagged in the meantime. When's the last time you really stared down a small beaver dam?