"She’s got issues," is what they said about Riley. As a first year teacher, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but my instincts told me that Riley was not going to be easy. She came in to my lesson smoking a cigarette, speaking on her phone, and gaining the eternal admiration of her fellow 15-year-old classmates. Five years later and Riley is in prison. The statistics said that was likely to happen. But why was Riley’s fate so inevitable? Why do some children fall into the same predictable downwards spirals? A teacher in a challenging school shares stories of the kids she taught and the difficulties they faced, and ponders how our modern values are contributing towards the demise of a generation.
