I have come to the conclusion that it is useless to try and control teenagers. Every attempt is doomed from the start. A key problem here, I believe, is that the natural tendency towards the contrary, found in all people, is magnified in teens. The other problem is that adults seem to forget this, along with every other aspect of the teenage mind.
A typical example of this occurred at my school a month or so ago. Some higher up, for reasons unknown, decided that police should talk to the year 7-9s about cyber-safety. The first on a list of bad decisions. It does no good telling teenagers about bullying. Anyone who remembers teenage-hood knows this. Beyond that a 30-something-year-old cannot tell a room of 15-year-olds about advances in online technology without looking silly. My dental hygienist, for example, thinks he's being 'cool' when he talks about 'going online and looking at the facebook'. Walking in to the library my only hopes were that the presentation wouldn't be interactive so I could lapse into a state of semi-conciousness.
Unfortunately the presenter wasn't just completely useless at discouraging online bullying, she actually created new problems. She asked whether our school had a 'goss' page on facebook. We didn't. Yet.
Yeah, that's right. By talking about how bad these goss pages where she inspired some kids to make one. A goss page is, apparently, a pace where kids from a school write nasty things about each other for the whole world to see. The internet bathroom wall.
But that wasn't the end of it. Not at all. One week later years 8 and 9 were called in for a meeting. They told us all about the goss page. About how horrible and illegal and irresponsible it was. How the police were now involved and questioning students (interestingly, they didn't mention how the police had started the chain of events off). They told us that even looking at the page was encouraging it. I think the word 'ignore' appeared about 80 times in the speech.
Can you guess what happened next?
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