is this high school/teenage reality?

On the way back from seeing my dad in hospital two weeks ago I passed by my high school just at morning rush. That gave me the idea to see if EHS would appreciate having me stop by and leave some of the slitmasks that we have made for use in the spectrographs on the Keck telescopes. (I have lemons with my dad, so that would be lemonade, right?) I have presented those masks to other schools. When I presented them to my elder daughter's class the session went on for an hour and the teacher had to cut off the stream of questions in order to get the class back on to his curriculum.

So I wrote to the teacher who taught me chemistry, but I was unclear about the nature of the items and my notions. I wrote again making it very clear how compact and presentable the masks are. This is the reply I got:

Again, thank you for the offer, but, while all of the science things are of interest to you, the teen-agers are not going to be interested. They really don't look to the future, except as far as the week-end, and dealing with the reality of the outside world is not of interest to them. In fact, they reject the reality of the outside world. When we try to show them anything that deals with the reality of their future workplace or any other such thing, especially science things, they shut off. It was nice of you to think of EHS.

I'm still unhappily assimilating the implications of this. Maybe I'll try my junior high school....