Everyone has the occasional bad class, but my worst run of sustained teaching failure came during the fall semester of my first year. I do not include the spring semester because the class in question consisted of twelfth graders, and end-of-year exams, graduation ceremonies, and my own tacit surrender ended any pretense that I was actually teaching those students by some time in February.
People curious about school assume that the bad classes are filled with spitball-launching hard cases. This is surely true for some unlucky teachers, but my worst classes were always the apathetic ones. I had just enrolled in what I thought would be a one year stint in a teaching program for Americans in Central Europe. I ended up in a village in Northeastern Hungary.
Teenagers today are sadder and more anxious than a generation ago. The surgeon general has declared a youth mental health crisis, depression and…
