I came to school on Wednesday, but a lot of students didn’t. Many of those who came said they were afraid, confused, angry, and anxious. Many Latino students tell me of ICE raids that happened on their neighborhood a decade ago. Several recall seeing their fathers handcuffed and thrown into vans by armored, helmeted officers. Some did not see them for years. A few kids have done time in private immigration detention centers. Many have family members who came to the United States from countries abused by corrupt regimes. Maybe the kids don’t understand how America’s government works. Don’t they know that there are checks on executive power and that campaign bravado—even the cruelest sort—doesn’t necessarily follow the country’s elected presidents into the White House? Maybe the kids—some of them gay, many of them immigrants, most of them young women—worry in a histrionic, sky-is-falling fashion because they’re less touched by “real-world” concerns than adults, who, of course, know better.

Their sense of the significance of the occasion and their expression of their concerns should not be dampened. Instead, it should be viewed as the ultimate teachable moment.

Every year, when I ask students what they learned from the class simulation—my artificial teachable moment—they say they realize that loyalty isn’t as ironclad as it should be. They didn’t question why they had to spy on fellow seniors; they chuckled about the task but they did it anyway. I had a points-hungry go-getter two years ago who eagerly filed detailed supplemental reports on her boyfriend.

Students say they learned how quickly a mission supposedly for the greater good can take an unpalatable detour. They admit that they did not always immediately grasp swift changes to previously outlined rules. They admit that they followed me on Instagram without considering the risk of letting an authority figure (were he so inclined) glimpse their personal lives. They realize that they didn’t ask for details about my plan to eliminate senioritis—that they formed no serious opposition, that they just grimaced when my back was turned and whined lightly in isolation. They cared about their grades, they admit, and they thought I was funny, so they did as they were told.

For these reasons, they always fail the simulation. From their performance, they learn a lesson about their weaknesses. This is also a key lesson from 1984. Understanding it can inform their response to the direction their country might be headed.

A good teacher does not try to firm up an ideological resistance along partisan lines. Instead, a good teacher shows students how to discern clickbait from reported stories and to read both Breitbart and The New York Times, not to keep a balanced personal perspective so much as to examine how media outlets interpret and spin events. In an age when fact-checkers can provide guidance in real time and the internet swells with more information than a person can actually take in, students need to be able to read more than captions and watch clips longer than 10 seconds.