I'm quite aware of the chirpy, 'cloud 9' high some teens are on dur­ing cer­tain days, and there are the sin­is­ter days when you feel (key­word "FEEL") as though you can de­mol­ish any­thing in your path!Emo­tion­al im­bal­ance is some­thing that takes a while to con­trol to a 'T', es­pe­cial­ly since we're teenagers, but it has to be done.I've wit­nessed end­less sit­u­a­tions where teens go de­ranged on peo­ple (both their age and old­er) be­cause of sce­nar­ios of mis­con­cep­tion. Like the cafe­te­ria la­dy who isn't too well says that you didn't give her the five dol­lars for the pie and juice you asked for.

The girl's ac­tu­al re­sponse to this scene was to get on 'grimy' for 'Tants'. Mak­ing the rest of the 'hun­gry' stu­dents in the line (in­clud­ing me) wait even longer to get some­thing to eat! The sit­u­a­tion sub­sided, when Tants' hus­band came and gave in to what the girl was rude­ly say­ing, giv­ing her the two items she asked for.Ap­par­ent­ly she wasn't in the best of moods that day and when an op­por­tu­ni­ty for her to ex­plode pre­sent­ed it­self, she took AD­VAN­TAGE of it! Way too much! It seems as though some teenagers are los­ing their sense and sen­si­bil­i­ty to­wards adults. The re­al­i­ty is some teens have no re­spect what­so­ev­er!

I was taught nev­er to raise my voice at an adult (on­ly if they raise their voice at me or un­der com­plex cir­cum­stances). But the most com­mon one is hav­ing the com­mon civ­il be­hav­iour to know the time of day and say "Good morn­ing", "Good af­ter­noon" or "Good evening". Lis­ten to me, 'it would not hurt to have man­ners!' Say it 28 times and you might be­lieve it and RE­MEM­BER IT!Man­ners go a long way in life, when I mean a long way, a long (hold the "g" for five sec­onds) way. Some em­ploy­ers take their job ap­pli­cants to din­ner just to see how much man­ners they have and how they re­act and re­late to peo­ple.

Even if you or­dered a bot­tle of 'NON-AL­CO­HOLIC' wine and the wait­er keeps bring­ing dif­fer­ent ice teas you wouldn't 'loud up' the man and give him a sound beat­ing. Of course not, even read­ing it sounds pet­ty.It's a shame there are peo­ple who would re­sort to dras­tic ac­tions like that be­cause of their lev­el of in­dis­ci­pline. But for those who can be saved the dis­ap­point­ments of a life with lim­it­ed op­por­tu­ni­ties, I ad­vise you to be a lit­tle more cour­te­ous in your ap­proach to cer­tain sit­u­a­tions. Take a two sec­ond chill pill to think it over. Af­ter all, at the end of the day, it comes down to one thing...man­ners.

Ten­isha Sylvester

Barataria South Sec­ondary School