Long ago and in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, I was new to teaching. In those early days, I taught in the elementary school I'd attended as a child--not something I would recommend, especially for students with ... well ... spotty records. But I did. And so often in those days, I heard my older colleagues--and my former teachers--talk about kids today. These kids today, they'd say, shaking their heads and wringing their hands as they raised their eyes to the heavens as though sending a quick, silent prayer. Nothing that came after that phrase was ever complimentary. According to them, students' moral deficiencies were the result of one emerging evil or another--computer games, Bart Simpson, skateboarding. And these evils were always a sign that our nation--and perhaps all humankind--was on a path that could lead only to Armageddon. I mean, nothing about kids today, whichever days they might have been, was right. Kids were consistently lazier, less polite, less disciplined, and less able than any group of children conceived in any generation since man first stood upright. A young teacher with no experience teaching the brighter, more capable generations of times gone by, I had little to compare to my 1st graders. Still, they didn't seem evil to me, and I thought they were every bit as smart, polite, and ready as I'd been in the 1st grade. In fact, they seemed to have any number of skills and talents that I hadn't possessed. But then, I didn't learn to read until I was in 3rd grade, so maybe I wasn't a good barometer for the decline of civilization as we know it. I often wondered, though, if my old teachers had forgotten about me and my troublemaking class. After all, as the first wave of the 1960s, we were the protesting, sandal-wearing, Beatles-loving kids whose male classmates were suspended regularly for having hair over their ears. In that context, my kids seemed pretty tame. But I was new to teaching. What did I know? Maybe there was some virus infecting children of the 1970s that made them somehow inferior to students of the past. Maybe we really were headed to hell in a hand basket. Time passed and most kids did, too. And new groups of children entered and left. And, apparently, each new group was only worse than the one that preceded it. After a few years, I began to notice that my students were not getting progressively worse. They were the same generally happy, generally normal kids who were generally eager to learn. I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point, I came to see that the these-kids-today rants actually said more about the rant-ers than the rant-ees. I'm not a fresh, new teacher anymore. Quite the opposite, actually. But still I hear the doom-and-gloom talk, implying that we are descending toward certain disaster--one class at a time. Just the other day, someone explained to me that when he was a child, Everyone grew up getting spankings. Maybe that is why my generation has turned out the way we have. I nodded my head in agreement as I pondered the implications. It might be overstated, I thought, but perhaps the current financial crisis spawned by his generation's unbridled greed and the rancor in our political debates might just be the result of spankings. But then he continued. This generation is out of control. Everything is getting worse every day. Oops, I thought as I quickly stopped nodding my head. …