Sorry, I fall right between those two age groups, so am ineligible.
I'm 59, so I don't think I fit your categories.
I really wish I could help as helping students is very important but, I haven’t even reached anything close to 40.
Well, let's see. I did attend high school and wanted to very much. I took mostly college prep classes, and I was fortunate that it came pretty easily to me. I did not do a lot of studying, did minimal homework, but paid attention in class. I managed to graduate as valedictorian, and I was among the top 2,5% nationwide. Turned out to be good and bad because when I got to college, I had to learn to study really quickly. Culturally, I was from a small Southern town where as was more common then, everyone knew everyone else. One thing that was different for me, as a member of the first classes to be integrated, was that my class, for the first year, was the only class at the school I attended. We learned to all get along, black and white, I think largely because we did n ot have any agitation from older classes and did not have to try to show off for lower classes. We were like our own little entity. That class unity lasted all the way through high school. Besides my parents insisting on it, I think that has largely framed my views on race and how unimportant it should be to this day. It just was not unusual for some of my best friends to be of a different race,and it still is not today. Family life could be difficult in those days. My mother was the important parent in my life, and she made choices about keeping th family together that were far more common in those days. There was no #metoo. I did work my last two years of high school. I worked maybe 30 hours a week during school but a lot more during summer. It was not uncommon to work a minimum of 80 hours, with no overtime. We were given choices of minimum wage and no overtime, or a lower per hour and work as much as we wanted. Working lots of hours gave us more money and kept us out of trouble. It also taught me a lot for later in life as to the value of work. Clothes for me were mostly T-shirts and blue jeans, still the same. Long hair and the Eagles were just hitting big, We had Hotel California, Rumours, and Frampton Comes Alive all within a relatively short time. Boston came along shortly thereafter, but so did Disco. People were either Disco or not. I was not. Still proud of that. My friends were across the board and largely people older than me. Working was our free time, thoough there was the usual night-time hangouts. For us, being small town, first it was the new McDonalds, but then Pizza Hut opened up Exciting days there, lol. I was allowed to date, and did some, though we all tended to just everyone hang out together. Something else learned first year of college. I don't remember us having any real problems, not compared to today. Thre were no guns, the worst thing would be a fist fight and everyone made up the next day. Gas was cheap, as was beer and nobody looked real hard at IDs and the legal age was 18. I think kids today have it much harder. Kids are expected to grow up faster, know exactly what they want to do with their lives, and face a lot more adversity with things like scholl shootings and the like. As to sex in those days, there was nothing a shot would not clear up, cerainly not the fear of AIDS or HIV. I do worry that today's kids are not learning to socialize, they spend too much time locked away on computers playing games and the like, especially the young men. We weere outside every day, played sports and the like. Today, at many high schools they have a hard time fielding a football team, because the boys would rather play computer games. I still think sports teaches people to work together, though obviously in some places it is taken to extremes. I guess the biggest obstacles I see for today's teens is the division in society and the fact the problems are so severe that if we do not work together, there is no solution to them. There are big problems, as there have been before, but people do not talk, do not work together to try to find answers. They simply yell at each other, and I fear for the kind of planet and kind of life that is going to leave for today's kids. And I have two of them of my own I deeply hope have a better world than the one that exists now. Hope that was not too long for you. William, 59.