“I have a hard time talking to new people,” says a seventh grader. “I have social anxiety.”

“I’m such a procrastinator,” says another. “I know what I’m supposed to do, but I will avoid it until the last possible moment. I feel terrible about it.”

It’s not a bad thing that this generation of kids is very self-aware. It beats the cluelessness of my own cohort -- we didn’t have the Internet to help us figure out what was going on or find people who shared and validated our weird traits. But I worry sometimes that all the labels these adolescents give themselves will prevent them from seeing that they always have the possibility of changing their habits and disrupting their patterns, even if their personality remains fixed.

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It happens so often and with such pleasing predictability that I know it to be part of the learning process now.

I find out that I got something wrong, and I instantly see the correct solution.

Luckily, because I’m not a bombardier, my errors don’t cause loss of life. I can relish the moment when testing or checking reveals my mistake and I am suddenly able to see what I didn’t see before.

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I’m in the midst of knitting a sweater with lots of bobbles. Eighty-four of them, to be precise.

I’m counting because I’m desperate to be done with the dang bobbles. I guess I forgot how much I hate them. A single bobble requires that you first knit into one stitch three times. Then, you take those three stitches and work each of them again. Then again, and then again, and finally your misery is over and you turn the three stitches back into one, resulting in the finished bobble:

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Aspiring (or failed) guitarists often tell me of their troubles with strumming.

“I never could get the hang of it,” they’ll say, no matter how long they’ve been trying.

They think the problem is strumming. And they’ve probably sought help from a guitar teacher with the intent of resolving this strumming problem. However, I know the reason it didn’t work. It’s because their problem is actually their chord changes.

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It’s 1:00 PM on a Monday — time for electives at The Little Middle School. This week, students can choose between photography, catapult-building, and creative writing.

However, one eighth-grader comes up to a member of our teaching team with a request. “Can I do some more math instead?”

As the adult in charge, it’s so easy to say no. It’s easy to justify that decision, too. We could say that our students should be open to learning new things even if they’re not immediately interested. We could point out the unfairness or inconvenience of granting a special request to one student.

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