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Your Kids Are Nice People
I Live With Hundreds of Your Students and Am Here to Tell You They are Great Kids.
My family and I live in a residential college on a mid-western university campus. My husband is a professor, but I am a regular civilian. When I have time away from my corporate life and my own two teenagers, I try to entertain myself by getting to know the 168 members of Gen Z, most of them first-years, who live in our building.
Unlike others who opt to live on campus, I am not a natural fit for this kind of thing. I am basically a high-functioning misanthrope and it has been decades since I have been able to successfully fake sustained sincerity. But as the mother of teens, these newly launched adults feel increasingly familiar to me, and I’ve become unexpectedly protective and nurturing.
Frankly, it’s exhausting, but your kids are making me catch feelings. They are only two years older than my oldest child, so I treat them as little crystal balls projecting into the future. Your kids live all around us now. I encounter them all day, every day, and they are, to me, a surprising joy.
In the fall, they awkwardly say good morning when I pass them by, but I know they all have the same questions the minute I’m out of earshot: Who are these adult humans and their offspring, and why are they living in our dorm? The answer is that we’re here to be…