Give us your children
when you don’t know them anymore.
Give us the eye rolling masses
obsessed with making it new by remixing the old.
We’ll force them to read
and question everything they think they know –
since they think they know everything.

You’re welcome.

Give us the lost
who are seeing for the first time that they’ve
never actually seen many things clearly before.
Give us the self-absorbed, and we will show them where they intersect with their neighbors.
We’ll meet them in the process of becoming a bit more human.
Harness the abundance of energy and force the eye of the clever rogue toward the Good.

Give us the quiet pubescents
Who wear coats during heat waves
And shorts during snow storms.
Give us impulsive youth.
We’ll try to stay one step ahead of them, and
help them survive their teenage years.

Then we’ll march.
March to the homes of legislatures
who threaten our pay, who misuse your children’s funding,
and who make stupid laws that keep information from them.
We’ll beat down the doors of those who make this hard job
even harder.
We’ll march onto the sports field and support teenagers and their families.
We’ll march into our second jobs and pretend that we aren’t dog tired.
We’ll march to the store to buy the supplies we need to help the teenagers.

To wrangle them, we will study
make, process, plan, and
create
until we are sharp enough to be the
iron that sharpens iron.