Teenage years

A lesson I prepared about the topic: Young people

1. I’ve brought to school some quotations of famous people who wrote about being young. Then I asked my students to comment on them.

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it”. William Sommerset Maugham

“I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”   James M. Barrie

“Youth comes but once in a lifetime”      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Youth has no age.”Pablo Picasso

2. After this last quotation, we saw the video clip: Young forever by Jay-Z and Mr. Hudson and spoke about the activities young people were involved in.

3. Then we listened to the song again and completed the lyrics, gap filling exercise.

4. At this time I started preparing my students for a text we were about to read next. This text dealt with the advantages and difficulties of being a teenager these days

5. Before reading the text, I asked my students about teens’ hopes. These were my students' answers:

• Going to university and taking a degree;
• Having a successful career;
• Having a nice family;
• Having enough money to have a comfortable life;
• Being rich and famous;
• Being happy;
• Finding the love of one’s life;
• Travelling a lot;
• Doing something unique and outstanding.

Then I asked them about their worries:

• Being unable to have a fulfilling career;
• Being unemployed;
• Not having enough money to pay one’s bills;
• Dying young;
• Being rejected;
• Not having a fulfilling relationship;
• Being alone;
• Having no real friends;
• Being unable to fulfill one's dreams;


6. Finally, we read the text: Do parents know their kids?