Alright, everyone. It’s been a while since I talked about something that really matters, so here goes.

It is just irresponsible to tell someone to “act like an adult” or to “stop acting like a child" to try to correct wrong behavior. We need to say something else that doesn’t hinge on the assumption that adults are any better at treating people than children. High school attitudes and behaviors survive way past when the four years of high school actually end.

Confused? It’s ok if you are. I’ve just made a really…unorthodox statement, let’s call it—so I’ll do my best to explain.

First, we need to break down the core concept here, cuz it’s pretty straightforward. I’ll set up an example scenario—Let’s say an 8th grade girl insults another. She calls her a b***h. A teacher overhears it and, of course, jumps down the offending girl’s throat for saying something so rude and disrespectful. The teacher tells the girl “to act more like an adult”, that it’s “immature” to so freely insult someone like that. The teacher is using the logic that an adult wouldn’t do something like that—that an adult would be better than that, more mature than that, a kinder person than that. Even though that teacher has almost certainly said the same thing about someone else at some point, either directly or indirectly. Even though other adults say things like that and worse to each other. All. The. Time.

So at this point, I think I’m well within my rights to say that in this scenario, the teacher has lied to the student. You’d better believe an adult can and would do something like that, or worse. Don’t believe me? Take five seconds to Google our darling President’s track record of behavior. And this comes from a man currently occupying a position that is supposed to serve as a moral, ethical, and intellectual example for the rest of the country. Joke’s on us, I guess.

If nothing else, the teacher has lied to the student insofar as the teacher tells the student to “act like an adult”. A better thing to say would be to “act like a mature adult” or “act like a courteous, respectful adult”. The logic needs to be that the offending student needs to behave better, period. The student needs to improve their attitude regardless of whether or not anyone else does, old or young. The emphasis needs to be placed on the improvement of behavior for the students own betterment, because just using the justification that adults are above basic insults is laughably incorrect.

As a student teacher, I fully recognize how hypocritical some of this must sound, but I still have to hold to this principle—we all need to learn to be better than who we currently are, for all our individual sakes.