the kids aren’t cooked, you just need to hang out with them in the woods.
I mean you meet these young people trapped in their classrooms or nuclear families in paved over neighborhoods, you are going to see them at the lowest points of forced routine, atomization, gutted autonomy, academic stress, you are going to see them at their worst. you’re going to see addictive behavior. bad social skills. lashing out. uncreativity. laziness and distraction. they do look totally cooked.
you need to take them into the woods
I do outdoor education work, and within minutes of any elementary to middle schooler getting free permission to mess around with their friends in a clearing, they’re curious and driven again. they’re asking each other questions and yeeting pinecones at trees (science) and using their bodies. sometimes for evil. as is developmentally right. they want to know the names of birds! they want to teach someone pokemon! they want to build stuff and kick stuff and tackle each other and you into the snow!
they’re basically fucking institutionalized for 90% of their lives but their spirits are alive. you need to take them into the woods you need to treat them like animals with powerful inner lives and they’ll show you they are.
and you, if you feel like you’re relating too much, remember that you can also take YOURSELF to the woods
Two years ago I decided that I was losing my mind with my classroom teaching routine and needed to do something fun (for myself mostly). I started doing a "bird of the day" with my class, every morning. I'd show them a picture of it, play its song or call, and have a little bit of information about its diet and habitat.
They LOVED it. After a few weeks they could name about 20 birds by sight, and were starting to recognize some bird calls. My neighbor teacher always laughed when she'd hear my class chanting bird names when I quizzed them. I'd walk my class down the hall and have a chorus of kids whispering "chicka-dee-dee-dee" to themselves. One student sat one day doing a Tufted Titmouse call to himself ("Peter, Peter, Peter"). We went out to recess and they'd point up at the Chimney Swifts and laugh that they really do flap like they can't stay up, "just like Mrs. Beese said!" One boy got really excited the day we learned about Mourning Doves: "OH, I KNOW THIS ONE! This is my favorite bird!" and he made the cooing sound for us.
It was the almost the most excited about anything they'd been all year.
Kids need nature and it's been systematically removed from their lives.
