When the calendar says May, it’s Romeo and Juliet season for ninth graders all across America. It’s springtime in their 14th year of life, which means: birds, bees, young love — and untimely death? Ninth graders would prefer not to go there, but every year we invite them to.

“How old were they?” my students always ask.

“Your age,” I always answer.

“Gross!”

The occasional classmate capable of nuance reminds them: “People died when they were, like, 30. Plagues and stuff.”

Plagues and stuff. Yes! Life in Renaissance Italy was short, so it’s only natural that Romeo and Juliet’s flame burned so bright, hot and fast. They wanted to taste the sweet nectar of life before they died of typhoid or an infected bug bite.

It’s the young lovers’ passion that eludes my students. OK, fair, 14 is young in modern terms to experience the cold fire of life-extinguishing love. But passion? Surely 14-year-olds can wrap their brains around that concept. At 14, I was a passionate vegetarian. My best friend was a passionate thespian. We were unbearable … but passionate!

“What lights your fire?” I ask my students. “What do you care about?”

Crickets.

At teachers’ college, they invite you to honor the silence that follows a tough question.

In 2025, if you let the silence go for more than 30 seconds, do you know what happens? The phones come out.

“Oh, teach me how I should forget to think!” quoth Romeo in 14th century Verona.

“I can help with that,” quoth Siri, today.

The Maine State Legislature is considering a bill to ban cellphones from Maine’s classrooms (LD 1234), and this is just the leadership we need from our elected officials. Such a bill would take the onus of cellphone policing from parents and schools, and would allow us to do the more important jobs of parenting and teaching.

Get phones out of schools, that’s one very achievable notion. But that’s not all! We all need limits on how we use technology, particularly AI, whose potential is unknowable, and very possibly catastrophic. Remember that feeling of finally mastering a math concept? Or of writing a beautiful sentence? Remember the sensation of deep accomplishment when you finished “Moby Dick,” turned in your first science lab, or successfully rebuilt a carburetor? Hard is good. Hard is fun! AI is doing too much of the hard stuff for us.

A plague upon all our houses — we created these tools. And they’re shiny, and they make everything easier. The blame for our young people’s insouciance lies squarely on the elders of today, as much as the blame for an unchecked family feud lay on the heads of Lords Montague and Capulet. Schools of painting, schools of thought, sonnets, sambas and salons — none of it matters anymore. Thinking, feeling, it’s all too hard. You know what feels good? TikTok.

“Give me, give me, oh tell me not of fear.” Spend 10 minutes, or 10 hours, on TikTok. Either way, you’ll come away with zero. There’s no narrative arc, no inflection in the voiceovers, there’s nothing to hold on to, no there there. It’s a sweet opiate. And the real world is so dull, so slow in comparison, that you might as well log back into an algorithm that actually gets you.

Protecting our children’s futures looks like state laws that ban cellphones in schools and massively limit Generative AI’s capabilities. It looks like parents who collectively agree not to give their kids cellphones until age 16. It looks like holding a hard line, an unpopular line, where our children’s digital lives are concerned.

Giving kids phones and unfettered access to Generative AI was a bad idea; now we know better. It isn’t too late for our youth to enjoy a childhood and young adulthood unsullied by the stultifying imagery and toxic messaging of TikTok. It isn’t too late for our kids to learn how to think critically, to form passionate opinions and deeply reflect on the opinions of others. TikTok, Open AI, they pale in comparison to the empathic human mind.

It’s not just our legislators who are on the hook. It’s our job too, to read to and with our children, to encourage their interests in the arts, in science, math, in sports — in whatever gets them going. We must pursue and talk about our own passions, and notice when we succumb to the palliative succor of a longform scroll sesh on the couch, and choose a book of poetry, or a toss of the frisbee instead.

We must encourage our youth to taste the sweet nectar of life, and to write, to talk, to dance, to sing about it. We must let them love who they love, let them be who they are, and never ask them to hide it.

Passion, beauty, art and music, all the wild, dangerous feelings we experience when we engage with the world: this is what life is all about. Shakespeare knew it, and we do too.