Wise parents know that fighting a teenager, like fighting a riptide, is inviting doom.

I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my personal approach that creates the climate. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a student's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a student humanized or de-humanized.

Responsibility is fostered by allowing children a voice and wherever indicated a choice in matters that affect them.

Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other.

Many teenagers are tormented by terrors they deem private and personal. They do not know that their anxieties and doubts are universal.

How can we help a child change from undependable to dependable, from a mediocre student to a capable student, from someone who won't amount to very much to someone who will count for something. The answer is at once both simple and complicated: We treat a child as if he already is what we would like him to become.

Adolescence can be a time of turmoil and turbulence, of stress and storm. Rebellion against authority and against convention is to be expected and tolerated for the sake of learning and growth.