What’s the matter with kids today?

Not much, if you listen to Jim Zetah and Marty Webb.

“Nothing’s the matter with them that wasn’t wrong with us,” said Webb,a woman who graduated from two colleges in Iowa.

She repeated the question to Zetah when he entered her office at New Ulm High.

Thoughtfully, he answered,”I’d like to think, not too much.”

WEBB LAUGHED and extended her hand. Zetah accepted it and gave it a firm shake.

What’s the matter with kids? Not too much, maybe.

But the occasional problems teenage students encounter are reasons why Webb and Zetah hold counseling positions at New Ulm High.

Those occasional problems include non-attendance and “acting out”‘ in class.

The high school counters chronic truancy with detention and acting out with the traditional sending to the principal’s office.

STUDENTS WHO spend their time skipping school, Zetah said, tend to have low self-esteem they don’t think much of themselves-and they have learning disabilities.

Students who act out in class simply have not learned appropriate outlets for their feelings, according to Webb. The urge to hit somebody over the head with a book, for instance, might be more appropriately expressed by telling the person you are angry with him.

Webb concedes, however, that in that age group, reasoned expression doesn’t always work.

NEW ULM HIGH is concentrating on meeting the needs of students who are or might become behavior problems, though the program is in the planning stage, according to the counselors.

Zetah thinks the solution to potential behavior problems lies in simply finding one teacher in a school system of 50 or 60 faculty members to whom a student can relate. The student usually can find that person on his own, he added.

WHAT MAKES a good teacher?

A good teacher really likes kids, Zetah said. “It’s an attitude that kids can sense, they can see it, they can breathe it. It’s there.”

A good teacher must be patient,they said. A good teacher must be able to laugh at himself. A good teacher has to like himself. A good teacher “has to be human, and recognize that humanity in kids,” Zetah said.

The only difference between students in 1976 and students of 10 years ago is that some of their values are changing, Webb said. She has not isolated just what those new values are.

IN NEW ULM and communities of similar size,she added,students still share the values of their parents and are less prone to change than in larger cities or in communities with a high population turnover.

She paraphrased an educator who delivered an address at a District 88workshop Jan. 13 to say that too many students lack a “hope for tomorrow,” some goal outside the classroom to work on.

That hope might be a career,college or marriage, Webb said, but lately those hopes have been dashed by factors as diverse as Watergate, Vietnam, the rising unemployment rate and the declining success of marriages.

She and Zetah agree, however, that despite recent social and political upheavals, high school students in this town are weathering nicely.

New Ulm Daily Journal

Jan. 25, 1976