Yes, as a somewhat cynical crossing guard, this has come to a shock to me. The key was finding an angle to get them to follow my instructions. I noticed that teenagers often don’t do something for their own sake, they’ll do it because they want to.
I work at a particularly busy corner where I cross middle school students. The lights are kind of long, so a large group of teens pile up at the corner waiting to cross. Some start standing in the street. Since cars are making right turns, even on red lights, I don’t want anyone to get hit, so I remind them to stay on the sidewalk.
Now this might sound odd, but I have to be careful about hollering at kids for any little thing. If I go overboard with it “Dont stand there” “Dont spit” “Dont say the F word” etc, then it will be very easy for them to make my afternoon a living hell by going out of their way to bother me. If however I am unfazed by any teenaged acts of mischevious valor, they leave me alone.
Just the same, I didn’t expect them to listen to me when I told them to stay on the sidewalk, or to stay in the crosswalk while crossing. But they did listen to me, for an interesting reason: Usually the culprit was a member of a clique, and often the culprit wasn’t really paying attention to much of anything when I hollered at them. The fact that some crossing guard dude yells at the kid gives the other members of his clique an opportunity to embarass him. So ultimately, most of them follow my signals and I don’t have to yell much, because anybody that gets yelled at is embarassed to hell and back and usually doesn’t risk acting up, for fear of giving their friends even more ammo. 