This story makes me think of the time my school bus was taking us home after school, but encountered some kind of engine trouble on a very twisty, hairpin turning canyon road. It kept going, it was just going veeeerrryy sloooowwww, and that means the regular cars were getting stuck behind it.
I'm really not kidding about the tight, twisty turns, and this road being narrow. One lane each way, drivers frequently at medium to high speeds, but you couldn't see very far ahead in either direction. If you tried to just go into the opposing traffic (lane going in the opposite direction), you were taking a pretty big risk -- if a car was traveling at speed, you wouldn't know until it hit you.
But I'm also not kidding about how slow our bus was going, which increasingly meant some drivers got fed up and took that risk anyway.
Now, me and the other kids in the back of the bus were initially only watching this with passive interest...
...but remember, this is a school bus. It was long, and while the drivers behind is could not see the road ahead, the kids at the front of the bus could.
One driver started to move into the opposing lane, but a kid at the front of the bus (also not initially paying attention) called out, "uh, guys, there's a car--"
And me and everyone else in the back of the bus immediately went 🙅🙅♂️🙅♀️ flailing around to cross our arms at that driver, convinced we were about to watch a nasty car crash happen less than ten feet away from us.
Except that driver stopped.
They stopped, and when the bus inched forward another two feet, they even eased back into our lane, just in time for the opposing car to pass by.
When the kids on the bus realized that all these grown-ups were actually listening to us, it was a sea change. NO ONE was napping at that point. We immediately split up, with attentive kids moving to the front to squint out the windshields while the big (aka most visible kids) went to the back. Everyone was looking outside the bus, we rotated as kids got dropped off, we basically developed a call-and-response check system on the fly. The entire time, all these grown-up drivers behind us were paying attention; not a single one drove into the opposing lanes if we gestured for them to stop. Over a hundred grown-ups in cars put their lives in OUR hands, and when we knew that we respected the hell out of that and locked tf in.
The reason why so many kids teenagers act like overgrown toddlers is because adults treat them as such. If you treat teenagers like the actual young adults they are, they'll usually act as such, too.
theartofmadeline
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
janainaart
