Academic prizegivings will be different this year, with parents and caregivers unable to attend under Covid restrictions. Photo / Sangga Rima Roman Selia on unsplash.com
Opinion
Of all the things I learned at university, there is one particular lecture that I remember vividly even now, so many years after I graduated.
It was a sociology lecture in my first year, and was about the teenage years. Given my fellow students and I were ourselves all 17 or 18, we perhaps started that lecture feeling we knew a lot more about that subject than our (to our teenage eyes, incredibly old) professor - who despite wearing the tweed jacket with patched elbows that seemed to be the accepted uniform amongst our lecturers, was in fact just shy of celebrating his 30th birthday - ancient indeed!
While we started with an attitude of "we know more than you" we were soon jolted out of our academic ennui, as our lecturer casually stated that teenagers didn't exist in times gone by, and in fact, our 90s selves were just four decades along from the word having first been in common parlance.
He had all the evidence to prove his point - the word was first used in the UK in February 1957 when American rocker Bill Haley arrived in the country, the first major US rock star to tour Europe.
As he and his Comets stepped off their train in London, in a moment that was dubbed "the second battle of Waterloo" by the journalists present, they were mobbed by thousands of loud fans, the first display of teen-mania that was to become a familiar sight in the years of Elvis, The Beatles, The Jackson 5, right up to more recent teen idols such as One Direction, Justin Bieber et al.
Before then, the stages of life went from childhood to adulthood, with no name, or compassion for those hormonal and angst ridden years in between.
Teenagers didn't appear in older paintings, they weren't referenced in classical literature, they simply didn't exist.
For my classmates and myself, this idea that teenagers were a relatively new concept in the history of mankind was just incomprehensible. How could people, for so many centuries, have ignored the angst and emotion wrought upon us by the physical and hormonal changes racing through our teenage selves?
Even now as I write this, I remember so clearly all that emotion, that angst, that feeling of pressure, of being on the cusp of adulthood, yet still so young, that filled my teenage years. What strikes me as sad, however, is that the word teenager has become so negative since it was first used back in the 50s.
Teenager seems to be almost a swear word nowadays, and certainly often comes with negative connotations.
"Two teenagers? Wow, good luck." A random person in the supermarket queue giving her (unasked for) opinion on my children.
"You think the terrible twos are hard - wait till your daughter turns 13." - A friend at my then toddler's birthday party.
"Teenagers? Hah, they won't listen to anything," A older person from my church when I began studying my postgrad in secondary education.
Somehow, in growing up ourselves, we seem to have forgotten what it is like to be a teenager. While I admit I would like my goth hair dyed, purple lipstick, black nail polish and military issue boot wearing teenage self to stay the distant memory that the 25ish years since deserves, we do need to remember at least a little bit of what being a teenager is like.
Especially right now. If being a teenager was tough in previous decades, it is hundreds of times worse right now. While our teens might never know the pain of having to make all phone calls from a landline fixed to the hallway wall, in earshot of annoying brothers and strict parents alike, or the race to the library to get one of the only three books on the topic your teacher set for homework (no Google back then), but that doesn't mean their life is easier.
In fact, it could be argued technology has added to the pressures they face, not eased it. I am certainly grateful only a few printed photos remain of my former goth self, and if gym class was torture to my clumsy, uncoordinated self, at least my biggest worry was simply not catching the ball, or rather actually catching a ball ... to the face. Today, worries over digital photos being sneakily taken in the changing room and shared online outweigh worries around being picked last for the dodgeball game.
Now add Covid regulations and restrictions to the mix.
Students in Year 13 right now last had a "normal" year back when they were Year 11s. Their first year of NCEA turned out to be the last time they had an uninterrupted year of study at school.
Their peers in Years 11 and 12 have never experienced NCEA lessons uninterrupted by lockdowns.
Our country's intermediate students (Years 7 and 8) have yet to experience their intermediate school experience without lockdowns and cancellations marring their time there.
Those in Years 9 or 10 are yet to have a "normal" high school experience.
And that's just talking about the educational part of their schooling experience.
School is more than just classrooms and exams, it's more than being able to use the Pythagorean equation or explain the life cycle of a butterfly. School is also about sports competitions, swimming galas, academic prizegivings and school balls.
These have also been wiped off the timetable for many of our students these past two years, robbing them of the many things we took for granted at that age. Plans for the great Kiwi OE have been canned, and university visits have moved online.
At a time in their lives when many teens are already struggling to find a sense of belonging or their place in the world, Covid-19 has ripped away many of the rites of passage that acted as navigational markers pointing the way to their future.
So let's cut our teenagers some slack and give them our respect and understanding, because not only are they doing life a lot harder than we did back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, etc, but they generally seem to be doing it far better than us as well, despite all the turmoil the past couple of years have brought them.