“Baby boomers have long been considered the generation that did not want to grow up, perpetual adolescents even as they become eligible for Social Security. Now a growing body of research shows that the real Peter Pans are not the boomers, but the generations that have followed. For many, by choice of circumstance, independence no longer begins at 21.”

Patricia Cohen’s New York Times article, “Long Road to Adulthood is Growing Even Longer” really stuck with me after reading it. I guess what made it stuck in my mind repeatedly was how she explained the teenagers of yester year are becoming unbelievably dependent on their parents than ever before in comparison to the baby boomers where they were literally pushed out of the nest and had to figure out what life really meant as an adult. There was no such thing as holding your mom’s hand to help you through the process of buying a house or even finding a really good paying job.

Nowadays, teenagers and young adults are graveling to continue living with their parents’ until they reach the age of 40 or even beyond to be considered officially “real adults.” As Cohen explained in her article, I feel like society today is slowly forgetting the definition of what it means to be an adult as well as forgetting the values they were raised with from their parents when they were growing up. I witness this similar type of behavior from the middle schoolers at my school day to day where if something doesn’t go their way, they always run to their mom and dad in order for them to remedy the situation, then for them to sit down and understand why they can’t be doing what they have been doing in class with the teacher.

It is a real problem that educators face on a daily basis is the behavior and the attitudes young adults or teenagers bring into the classrooms and it is sometimes difficult to reason with them in a proper manner because of their overly protective parents who act more as a friend than a disciplinarian. I am afraid what the future Peter Pans will be like in schools especially now if we are competing against parents who don’t necessarily have a strong belief in their child’s independence development and keep coming to their defense whenever they misbehave or fail to do an assignment.

Out of the four readings that I read this past week, I have to say the one that really stood out to me as a future educator was the article by Ellen Brantlinger about Who wins and Who loses?: Social Class and Student Identities. I believe our society is sometimes jaded by what people perceive as a low socioeconomic status in terms of race. Many people are quick to judge that only minorities and immigrants suffer, but sometimes forget that all races can be affected by it.  Brantlinger interviewed two different individuals from the same race, one was a white female named Marissa who was consider an elite student and grew up in a very affluent area of Hillsdale while the other one was a white male named Travis who was bought up on the Southside of town in poverty stricken conditions.

Needless to say, Marissa graduate with an MBA and was doing well for herself as Brantlinger stated just given the fact that she was born into privilege. Travis, on the other hand, was plagued from the beginning with poverty and absolutely no hope of getting out of the poverty cycle that unfortunately he came to the conclusion to end his life because he was physically and emotionally drained and hated being targeted at school and in society for his low socioeconomic status. Even at school, teachers were constantly picking on him as were his own peers except for one teacher, Travis’ fifth grade elementary teacher, Mr. E.

I think it’s hard to bridge the gap between kids who are born into wealth and privilege and kids who weren’t and trying to create an empathic atmosphere amongst the two groups in a class setting. I think that will be the most challenging thing to do as an educator is breaking down those barriers and enforcing students to understand that “sometimes you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

“While it is justifiably demanded of whites that they examine their prejudices and feelings toward black Americans, there seems to be no eagerness on the part of black Americans to examine the aspects of their cultures that hold them back from full participation in our economy.” -Neal Boortz

I agree with Sadowski that this problem is slowly becoming an epidemic in a lot of urban schools where black students feel the need to “keep up their appearances” of not being portrayed as “white,” and so many of the them feel the need to dumb themselves down in order to feel accepted amongst their own community and peers. I never realized how much stigma there is around this topic and how it isn’t being talked about openly in schools. As Neal Boortz mentioned in the comment above, whites sometimes refuse to talk about their own prejudices and feelings when it comes towards black Americans because they don’t want to be perceive as racist whereas black Americans refuse to explore and answer the question why there isn’t a lot of participation nor effort for their children to achieve academically at school. I think for me, it is one of the most difficult concepts to understand as someone who was born and raised in a well to do suburban area and never had to deal with these types of experiences simply because my high school was predominantly white. 

I guess where I’m trying to get at is, for me as a future educator, I’ll never fully be able to understand the stigma around black Americans not looking at themselves as great students who can achieve and accomplish the same goals as white Americans without having the label “being white” at school. How can we, especially if we are white educators, allow black Americans to feel comfortable in their own skin without being marked as “being white” in the academic world for their achievements and feel proud of themselves without fearing the backlash from their community and peers?