THE RESILIENCE OF SNOWFLAKES

Every September, as the first day of school approaches, I spend a lot of time thinking about darkness. Perhaps other teachers would say the same, jokingly. But I teach a high school course on trauma literature. So the question of darkness—of how much trauma to expose my students to, and why I’m doing it—is, very sincerely, on my mind.

My students have been stereotyped as too fragile for difficult literature, too desirous of trigger warnings to survive being challenged, too self-involved to think beyond their insular among its Words of the Year, defining young adults of the 2010s as a group “less resilient and more prone to taking offence than previous generations.” (It also clarified, perhaps unnecessarily, that the noun is considered “informal, derogatory.”)