What Life Lessons would you teach today’s youth?

If you were given the opportunity to teach a class called Life Lessons to middleschool students, what wisdom would you impart to them? What have you learned over the years that would help them have a better life? It’s an interesting topic for discussion.

For a friend of ours, however, it’s more than an idea or an interesting discussion. She’s teaching just such a class. Our 82-yearold friend is a lady in the true sense of the word, lives in Oklahoma, and was invited by a private middle school to teach a class on Life Lessons. And, from everything we’ve heard, the students are enjoying it as much as the teacher.

We’ll call our friend Miss Peggy, and the lessons she is teaching these youngsters are something every child should have — and maybe some adults.

Miss Peggy has taught the students flag etiquette as well as the proper way to tie a man’s tie. She has worked with them on how to shake hands and make eye contact when talking to someone. In addition, on a more practical level, they have learned how to clean house, make a bed, do laundry — and learned the proper way to fold the clean clothes.

They have even learned some basic cooking skills and, along with those, Miss Peggy taught them how to set the table and proper table manners. Then, the last week of school, they came to her house for lunch, ate some of the food they had prepared earlier, at a table they had set and using the table manners they had been taught. For the lunch this spring, she even taught them how to make homemade ice cream. What a great school field trip.

Along with the cooking lessons, she taught them basic sewing skills. Each child even made an apron, which they probably used when they fixed lunch at her house.

There are a lot of kudos to be given for this idea: We congratulate the school leaders for coming up with and implementing it, we think Miss Peggy must be doing a phenomenal job to keep the kids excited when teaching them about stuff that might have caused them to roll their eyes, and we applaud the students for their willingness to learn something new.

Miss Peggy doesn’t have a set curriculum, and the school didn’t tell her what to teach. Each class varies based on the interests of her students and the time of the year. For example, during the spring semester, she taught the kids how to write thank you notes and had them write a thank you note to their mothers for Mother’s Day.

Opportunities to be involved in such a class are limited, but the concept of teaching impressionable children Life Lessons is not. We all know that children often listen better to adults who are not their parents, and maybe we should all keep that in mind.

Rather than nagging our own kids until everyone is going crazy, maybe we should look for opportunities for them to learn from someone like Miss Peggy. Or, maybe if you are part of the older-and-wiser generation, you could look for ways to impart your wisdom and knowledge. We can probably guarantee parents won’t complain.

Life Lessons — we can probably all come up with things we would like to teach the younger generation.