Teaching Teenagers

Teaching Teenagers

If you have to ask how to connect with teens today, it’s too late.  You aren’t going to learn how to do it.  At least you won’t learn how to do it in this lifetime.

I’ve decided that being able to have some sort of connection with youth is at the same time a blessing and a curse.  I don’t know which is greater, the curse or the blessing.  At times I truly wonder.

The sweet young mother of a teenager, pre-teen, and younger children came up to me today after church and said that her child and others were so excited that I taught her Sunday school class today.  (I subbed for my wife who is visiting a daughter in Texas.)  That would have been her pre-teen that I taught.  I have that mother’s teenage son in an early morning seminary (religion) class for high school students five days a week.  Apparently her son rats me out around the dinner table, and for that reason his siblings cannot wait until they are in my early morning class as well.  Other moms at church tell my wife and me that we cannot move until after their children have had all four years of this early morning class with me and their Sunday lessons with my wife.

I’ve come to a handful of conclusions about teaching teenagers.  Let me share those conclusions with you.

1. You can’t.  You cannot teach a teenager anything.  Even if you can get a teen’s attention long enough to make an important point or teach a valuable principle, it will be gone before the end of a class or any other setting that you may be in.
2. Parents want YOU to teach their children at 6:00 a.m. each day during the school year because THEY would rather not get up at 5:00 a.m. each day to teach teenagers who cannot be taught anything anyway.  Of course, there are other reasons, like getting a spouse and other children up and out the door and then maybe hitting the door themselves.
3. Parents are grateful for those who teach Sunday lessons to their children.  That gives parents at least an hour on Sunday when they do not have to wrestle with at least one child.
4. A lesson with food will hold a teenager’s attention better than a lesson by itself.
5. A lesson with a joke included will guarantee that teenage students will at least learn one thing during the time that you are standing in front of them babbling off relevant meaningful life lessons.
6. Teens are still children at heart.  If you share a personal story they will remember that story, especially if it is funny or if you got hurt.  Share an account from somebody else’s life and they will forget it before they hit the door at the end of class.  Teach an important lesson?  Forget it!
7. The best lesson you can teach a teenager is that she or he is loved and that you happen to be the one that loves him or her.  Showing that love works better than telling them.  Nothing else really matters.
8. If you have to ask how to connect with teens today, it’s too late.  You aren’t going to learn how to do it.  At least you won’t learn how to do it in this lifetime.  I’m still trying and I am convinced that I am a hopeless case.