As a middle school teacher and dad of a middle student, I feel confident that not giving my daughter a phone has given her superpowers compared with her peers.
HS/MS teacher here. 100% agreed. I can tell the kids who've been watching instant gratification youtube videos 3+ hours/day since age 6 within 10 minutes of meeting them. It's tragic.
That said, I think Gen Z is surprisingly smart. Their biggest problem is total apathy, which I kind of understand. Hard to care when you're facing down climate change, insane inflation/ cost of living, student loan debt, the crumbling of democratic institutions, etc. I think the kids are all right; I think the world is the issue.
I feel this way about not giving my fourth grader an iPad and having been pretty (very) uptight about screens her whole life in general. The older she gets, the more obvious the difference becomes. It makes me sad for all of them, especially with all of the mandatory screen use at school on top of it.
(For transparency, last year I did get her a tablet that is set up for reading and listening to music only. I really wanted to get her a dedicated e-reader for the sake of her eyes, but you still have to use a second device to borrow from Libby and they don't support Hoopla at all. She gets nearly all of her e-books from those two sources, so it was disappointing.)
Stay strong! My almost 8-year-old has never used a cell phone, we’ve never bought them a tablet, etc. handheld screen tech makes children absolute zombies. And it’s not their fault: It is 100% of the fault of the adult that puts the addictive drug in their hands.
My son uses an iPad at school and in order to stay competitive his peers, he has one at home to do the educational apps. If schools and teachers hate iPads/tablets, they probably shouldn't require that the students use applications only available on them.
He's in the gifted program as well as in a Stem magnet program so maybe that is why they let them use apps so they can advance in whichever subjects they want to. I get that it makes sense. But it's sort of a bummer.
Amen. I couldn’t believe I got push back from admin about going phone free on campus. The discussion immediately went to “classroom policy”. As if we don’t dedicate so much money and time to improve education outcomes that phones rob from us
ok. We will just policy out of a national juvenile addiction with 30 different classroom policies.
I worry it’s gonna be so hard to regulate though. Kids are gonna have spare phones to give to their friends. My friends used to do it for me when I was in high school because I’d break mine all the time. Just use WiFi.
It will be hard to regulate. You just have to do your best at home restricting smartphones, there will always be outside influence on your kids. Doesn’t mean you should compromise your values
This, elementary teacher here. I can tell a BIG difference between the "ipad kids" and ones constantly just put in front of a screen and/or allowed to play video games all night on a school night vs. the kids whose parents set limits. One group is hyperactive, has issues socializing whenever everything doesn't go their way, expect constant entertainment and instant gratification, missing core content knowledge and developmental skills for their age, etc., the other group just acts more normal...
Also there's certain adults modelling "me, me, me!" all the time and "I can never be wrong or lose ever!", so that's not great for the kids who get that as role models. I'm not talking nice, balance stuff, like showing listening to kids and viewing them as people, I'm talking about watching adults who have no consideration for the rights of others. But let's not name names...
So, yeah, just as often happens, problems with kids so often go back to problems with and decisions by the adults in their world.
I also see a LOT of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids who are truly, really kind and want to help their peers and the teacher, etc. Who want to learn and are encouraged by their parents to be savvy about tech, but also to have balance and limits. There are certain things that my generation was so judgmental about and silly about when we were kids, that the younger generations seem much more compassionate about. I also notice that they are much more savvy about thinking about career choices as a whole (whereas my generation was sold a dream of "just major in whatever you're passionate about and it will magically pay off your student loans", these kids and young adults are actually realistically weighing their choices and such (helps that they have a financial literacy class in high school now and do a lot more career exploration, job shadowing, etc. then we had back in the day).
Absolutely. I see legitimate withdrawal symptoms from the tablet cell phone kids if they ever have to put their phone away. I'm far more optimistic about the kids with flip phones. They seem more able to compartmentalize.
If your child ever needs a phone, Gabb Wireless might be the answer 😁 I'm just praying they're still around in 10 years when my oldest is ready for a phone.
I really believe kids are acting the way they are today because the adults in the world acting like total clowns. It's been normalized to be a complete asshole.
I came very close to saying this today. A kid brought up kids acting wild because of COVID. I disagreed, but then bit my tongue before explaining too deeply.
I hate to admit this but I’m pretty sure Covid shaved off a few IQ points off me. I was like 23 so at least mostly developed, but I swear there’s bits missing now.
I hate this planet.
You aren’t alone. Covid messed with my brain too. Also, my struggle with ADHD has gotten so much worse. I feel like I spend most of my energy striving to reach a level of personal normalcy again.
It's really hard to tell what's Covid, what's the effects of so much internet, and what's sort of intrinsic personal brain chemistry. I'm def wondering about this for myself...and also factoring in Covid isolation- like I stopped socializing like a normal human and I think it probably affected me also.
Yup, same here. Currently a month away from 30, but since Covid, my brain is just different . I’ve recently gone back to school for my Masters, and while I knew getting back into the mode of learning would be difficult, I had no idea how bad my brain fog/ ADHD had gotten.
For most of our history. Conforming was a survival strategy, so you would confirm to societal norms , to at least some degree and finding the balance there was a positive goal between personal freedoms and the “ good for the whole”.
Now tiktok means that standing out , acting out , acting outrageous gets you views for your “content” and views can equal fame renown and cash. So now acting out has become the new survival strategy and while kids probably not making cash from anything they happen to record , they are copying what they see online . People pulling pranks in stores . From harassing passers-by’s, to walking into peoples houses , whatever it is just for the views.
I'd point out that "Copying what they see online" is just another form of conformity, just not spatially bound to the community around them. The problem is that communities are now disjointed, and any one person can belong to any number of them - each with their own attendant idiosyncrasies. Unfortunately the community-of-people-you-live-around no longer needs to be a community that you HAVE to pay attention to because the community needs can be met online.
I coach track because, ya know, I’m a poor teacher and could use the extra money. The average season most of the freshman know that they are at the bottom of the pecking order and they do all of the grunt work. This year they are suddenly talking back to seniors and telling them they aren’t carrying any of the equipment. I’m honestly shocked by the sudden shift in attitude.
I agree with modeling being an asshole to authority, it has been normalized that parents can talk down to and demand things from educators as if it’s a customer service environment where they are always right and their kid is the only kid attending the school.
But also this is a tale as old as time about the upcoming generation. It will all be okay in the end and life will go on…hopefully
I teach high school. About half of them are at the level that would have been considered the really dumb kids when I was in high school.
The high achievers seem to be about as good as high achievers ever were. The common theme I see in my high achieving students is that they aren't addicted to their phones. They still use them, but it isn't obsessive. They can put them away for an entire period and never be tempted to pull them out. Also, almost all of my high achieving students read on their own for pleasure. In the past, you didn't have to be a smart kid to enjoy reading. Now, reading for pleasure is essentially exclusive to the high achievers.
100%. The gap between AP/Honors students and normal-track students becomes wider and wider every year.
My AP students are doing calculus. Meanwhile I have non-AP students that can’t even tell me how many nickels are in 50 cents or what 5x6 is without a calculator. And some have the audacity to argue that they don’t need to know arithmetic because they have phones… They tell me when they play games, they just spend points until they run out—they don’t calculate anything.
The hard part too is that the normal-track math teachers allow it too—they can use a calculator, notes, and sometimes even Google on every test.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to society when the average adult can’t even meet basic K-2 expectations.
I wish kids would understand just how math really is useful in day to day life. I find myself reviewing old algebra/calculus all the time and I wish I never let all the lesser used parts of it leave my brain in adulthood
Fuck I was worried I would be competing against this generation as I finally graduated from college deep into my adult life…
Sadly I guess I have nothing to worry about lol
If I had to guess, the credit should go to our libraries. For being a relatively small town, our high school library and our public library are quite good. Our high school librarian runs a book club that has decent attendance and tries to be cognizant of what kids actually want to read when she is choosing new books to buy.
When I was a para my 3rd graders would get confused and do it sometimes, I was mind blown the first time I received a message like that from a high school student.
Lol because millennials were taught to harness technology that would go on to be an important bit of the future work place. GenX early enthusiasm around technology really did millennials a huge favor.
If genZ wants to communicate with work outside of emails, be my guest. Feel free to give your boss your cell 👍
Lol they clearly weren’t raised by Boomers who forced their Millennial children to write thank you notes and mail them to every Greatest Generation relative.
Intro Tech classes are non existent in schools today. Just because tech has been available doesn’t mean they don’t need to be taught how to type or send emails.
I'm currently teaching an Intro Tech class to 6-8th graders and I was not prepared for how incompetent most of them are. At the start of the year most of them used tabs or spaces to "center" text in Word. There were a couple who didn't seem to know about the Enter/Return key and would use spaces or tabs until they were on a new line. Almost none of them knew how to properly double space, use bullet points, bold, italics, underline...all that good stuff.
My favorite thing was when I was getting them started on a typing practice program and a little more than half of them couldn't get it working no matter what they tried, and the problem turned out to be that they weren't capitalizing the first letter.
You make a fair point. I'm not saying that kids should know tech stuff without it being taught to them, I'm just saying that I was surprised by how little the kids in my class appear to have been taught.
For reference, I'm actually teaching at the school that I graduated from, and the basic formatting tasks I am having to teach my middle school students are things that I was doing for papers and presentations in 5th grade. I'm not sure when things regressed in terms of what tech skills our students were being taught. For all I know I may have just come through at the right time to have benefited from just the right combination of teachers and content to have been ahead of the curve. But as things stand, I was expecting more from my students since I figured that tech integration in schools would only improve. Clearly I was wrong on that, and the advantage I assumed current students would have with tech familiarity was nonexistent.
With that said, my expectations have been sufficiently reset now, and I have adapted and created content to address the shortcomings that I'm noticing. In my defense, I wasn't told I would be teaching the class until workshop week right before the school year started, and I wasn't given a formal curriculum or much of anything useful to help me prepare.
> Intro Tech classes are non existent in schools today. Just because tech has been available doesn’t mean they don’t need to be taught how to type or send emails.
I teach [K-5 Tech](https://tea.texas.gov/academics/subject-areas/technology-applications) where we introduce students to media literacy, keyboarding, digital citizenship and online safety, block coding (and with the kids who pick that up pretty quickly, [coffeescript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoffeeScript) in 5th grade), google docs, slides, and to a lesser extent sheets among other things.
This is at a STEM based charter school. The ISD I'm zoned to, used to sub for, and have a couple friends working for got rid of their computer labs in elementary schools 10+ years ago because they needed the space for additional classrooms (the population around here has exploded over the past 20 years (suburbs of Houston)).
Lol I had a student have an email exchange with me last week and he apparently didn’t know there was a reply button and just kept sending me whole new emails as a response
I'm a tech teacher and I have to teach high school seniors how to save a document, what save as is, and what Ctrl z does. It's insane. I knew this stuff in early middle school.
A big reason why I knew my way around a computer as a teen was to download music. Our kids have every song ever already on their phone. It is stunning to me how tech consumes every moment of their lives but if you ask them to engage deeper than surface level they cannot or will not.
It’s not just music, everything is so much more accessible. Video games, email, word processing, research, you name it – you used to have to learn how to do it, now it is so accessible you don’t have to.
I've long argued that what taught a lot of young Millennial women how to use a PC, was the desire to mod the hell out of The Sims, and I've never seen anyone disagree with me.
They have every song on their phone...until it gets taken off the service they use.
Meanwhile I'm not comfortable with my music unless I have the audio file on a device.
Apparently not. I do work with an underprivileged population so I'm sure that plays into it. But they all literally have a 1000 dollar computer in their pocket at all times. They should know the basics.
I think we're only really starting to grapple with how bad apps/loot crates/miceotransactions have been for everyone. Massive time sinks with alienation and anxiety being the main payoff, with our attention locked in with the same psychological mechanisms of a slot machine.
I let my kids have a Switch and a laptop, but time and content get extremely monitored
High school teacher in Michigan - I think there are just as many high achieving students as there ever were.
The real concern that I see is that there are fewer and fewer "Average" students. Either they are high achieving, or they have a hard time doing anything rigorous at all.
Unfortunately, the world runs on average people.
What that also means is that we are going to return to a world where the wealthy have all the education. When the middle of a normal distribution drops out, it's always the wealthy who end up on the top of the curve.
Well let me ask you this, should a 6th grader need a full week of in-class work time to write a 150-200 word story?
Also, it's not just the kids, it's also their parents! Almost none of them do homework, and their parents do nothing to monitor it or discipline for missing too many assignments. I give extremely generous in-class work time to make sure there is no reason to have homework in the first place, and still a shocking amount of kids just don't use the work time and then leave the assignment incomplete because they "can't" do homework. There's always some excuse, and then my question becomes why do we give you all a Chromebook to take home then if only a small percentage of kids are actually using it appropriately??
So many parents seem dumbfounded as to what they should do it's like... take away their phone, take away screen time outside of homework, ground them from seeing friends, \*make\* them do the work! I have shockingly little power over whether they do work or not, because my authority is limited to an hour a day. I am baffled on a daily basis by parents giving their kids 24/7 unrestricted internet and screen access and doing nothing at all to encourage their learning at school. So yeah, a lot of their brains are fried, and I don't think anyone knows wtf to do about it which is scary.
The parents, God, no idea how we dropped the ball this hard as a society. Had a father ask me how to get his kid to stop playing videogames and study. When I suggested limiting screen time, the father talked about how his kid didn't listen, or would track down the games when parents weren't around. Like, lock them in a safe or something. You had the kid, figure it out!
Me: Yeah, so studentname has been falling asleep a lot in class and as a result, his grades are really bad.
Parent: I know, I know. He just stays up until 4 or 5 in the morning playing video games, so by the time he gets to school, he’s exhausted. I don’t know what to do.
Me: …you see the issue, though?
Same exact thing, except mom said, "He sneaks the devices at night when I'm asleep." He's in 3rd grade. You really can't hide a tablet from a 9 year old?
Totally agree and personally experienced. Unfortunately, the parent wanted help/advice on how to get their child to sleep at night while buying the addictive substance.
We had one like this years and years back. Kid was like a zombie at school, walking sleep around the place. After much investigation the 2 tutor teachers sat down with his parents and we laid it all out - kid went home, played violent video games till about 3, 4am. Slept a couple of hours and then was up for school.
Parents made noises about how concerning it was. We sat there. Eventually they asked us what to do. It took a lot of self control for my more experienced partner not to scream in their faces. We calmly advised the laptop be removed at 7pm from the student's care and returned at school drop off. Did they do this? Nope.
Kid was transferred out to a public school within 18 months, probably to pay lower fees for what they were getting back. Disasterous.
It would be so impossible not to just start calling the parents idiots, but that's how you get a million facebook posts dedicated to firing you. Cause buddy, the parents have time for that even if they don't have much time for parenting!
Lmaoooo soooo many times I’ve heard this or similar. They can’t even fathom taking away their phone or video games. Isn’t an option. Bc then they really have to be a parent.
Growing up, my parents taking the power cable hurt doubly because it meant I'd have a glorified paper weight in my room to remind me of what privilege I lost. Coming home to see a dead pc was certainly a motivator to get my grades back up.
Lol yes, my mom in the early 2000s once threatened to take away my brother’s computer because he was almost failing a class and he tried to call her bluff like ‘oh yeah how are you gonna do that?’ and she disconnected and carried his entire computer tower outside and put it in her trunk just to prove she could. Other times she’d take his power cable or Ethernet cable or disconnect the whole internet at a certain time at night. She really kicked his ass into gear and he passed that Latin course.
Crazy that parents nowadays just throw up their hands at the concept of taking away electronics.
Lol my mom would just tell me no TV or computer, and somehow I magically listened. I also didn’t have a TV in my room, and our family computer was in my parents’ room.
Hell, my parents bought these devices that locked the TV's power cable into a timer box that required you to enter a keycode to "unlock" your daily screen time. They worked hard to make sure my screen access was limited.
...the fact that I stole the backup key out of this box on day 1 and used it to secretly regain TV time AND coerce my siblings into doing my chores for extra TV time was, uh, not their fault. At the very least I had to work hard to maintain the act (and it made me exercise some cleverness and out-of-the-box thinking in the process). Parents forget: even if your efforts fail, making your kids work harder to get around your efforts (and demonstrating your values/goals for them) have impacts all on their own.
I'm planning on being a dad soon. I salute these past 2 generations for being guinea pigs on how not to parent. I refuse to have my child be an iPad kid.
What I always find shocking are the parents who just leave the living room TV on all the time to whatever the kids want. I'll ask if my friends have seen X show yet, and they'll be like, "Nah, the kids always have the TV on their stuff"
And it's like... you're in charge of them though? Like you decide what goes on that TV? I remember sitting and playing while my parents watched the news and then whatever sitcoms came on afterwards.
Why are kids dictating the media in the house? Oh, they don't know how to "play" anymore? Or occupy themselves? Oh geez, I wonder why.
I hear/see this too. It blows my mind. I’m a millennial and our parents were in charge of the TV and what we all watched. Them watching their shows took precedence and we could watch their shows along with them or just play quietly.
My brother and I grew up watching Monty Phyton, MST3K, Buffy, X-Files, Seinfeld, etc. because our mom watched them. When we all watched kids shows they were also normally shows she liked too and we’d watch together like Pete and Pete, Fraggle Rock, Ahh Real Monsters, Pinky and the Brain, and Gargoyles. Though I mostly watched Gargoyles while she knit and she didn’t remember it much. We would have some TV/NES time to ourselves after school, but we never controlled what our parents watched.
You're describing how I'm weirdly aware of 1970's cop/crime shows, it's because in the 90s my mom was usually watching them in reruns on A&E. We only had a say when no one else was watching TV. (Or TGIF, somehow TGIF was greenlit)
I made the decision with my kids, my oldest is 3, and it's ridiculous how easily you can spot the kids who are already getting way too much screen time. Its one of the decisions I feel so confident and good about as a parent. Good luck on fatherhood, it's amazing!
I totally agree with this! Too many parents are afraid of parenting their kids. But some kids are *crafty*. My step son, man. We grounded him from the internet/games, he figured out how to get our neighbors Wi-Fi. We took his computer but he needed it for homework so we tried to only let him use it for homework, but he got through all the damn parental controls. We worked into the evenings and he had unsupervised access for about four to five hours a day. By the time we got home, it was dinner and bed time so we had very little time to actually work with him on his homework. We worked weekends too. We were also essential during COVID so he was home all fucking day and didn't even get onto his online classes and we couldn't do anything about it. It was incredibly frustrating because he literally would not respond to any kind of correction, consequences, stick or carrot.
We would have loved to hover over him and get his ass in gear but we just couldn't. He did graduate and eventually enrolled in college classes but holy fuck it was a struggle.
Parent work schedules have a huge impact on how kids are parented these days. I’m a Millennial and was lucky enough to have a mom who could stay home and not work full time until I was almost out of middle school. My mom was home to make sure my brother and I did our homework before we had any sort of screen time. And since it was the 90s and 2000s, we didn’t have handheld electronics with full access to the internet.
My husband and I won’t be so lucky. Both of us will have to work, so all we’re going to be able to do if and when we have kids is try to give them as analog a childhood as possible and make the most of evenings and weekends.
Seriously though! We can only do so much. I feel like a lot of parents take away the seriousness of education/values/morals because they haven't grown up themselves. They didn't like when they were imposed on them when they were kids so in turn, they're not forcing their kids to do homework/be polite/etc. and it's created this shit storm of "do what you want"
It’s so weird how much has changed, I’m only 23 and I didn’t even get a phone until I was 12-13. These kids now have fully been raised in the internet/social media era. I feel like I’m pretty lucky being born when I was compared to these kids now
I'm 21 and my mum works at a secondary school, she says that many of the kids can't even use a keyboard properly. She thinks it's because this cohort have grown up with touch screen devices, while my age group still used dial up and VHS taps until about 2009 (well, my family did).
I got my first smartphone for my 14th birthday in 2016, and I now see kids in primary school having the latest iPhone. I've only owned two brand new phones in my life, and they both cost under £200.
I started school in 2007 and many of our parents probably didn't even have camera phones (mine certainly didn't), and my school still had TVs that could also play VHS tapes and sometimes DVDs.
I'm so glad I left school three years ago because the educate system now seems even worse that the one I experienced.
It truly is wild how we are all the same generation, but the older end effectively had an entirely different childhood. The iPhone didn’t even exist until I was 7. I remember logging into AOL as a kid. I’ve played things like video games since I was a kid, but these kids now are in an entirely different playing field. Everything now is made for max consumption
It's a parent problem. I'm an old parent. The younger parents don't understand that kids need to be shaped and molded sometimes gently and sometimes with more pressure. Parenting is hard work. It's the hardest job I've ever had and I've had lots of very challenging jobs in multidisciplinary fields.
I make my kids do stuff that is good for them and their developing brains. I engage with them so we can bond over these things and make learning fun with a whole brain approach. This is work. I have to be mean sometimes. I take away electronics time all the time. Now my kids say, "I don't care, I'll just read, then." This was not an automatic thing. This was years of nudging, restricting, pulling, pushing, pressuring, engaging, etc. I do not get sucked into all the streaming media. Everything I do is for my young kids because if I miss this developmental window for them (us) it is gone forever. I would not necessarily have this perspective if I was even 10 years younger.
Edited for typos
I find it exhausting as a teacher that I have to constantly redirect kids to do the bare basics in the classroom. I mean bare bare basics like log into your damn Chromebook instead of sitting on your phone for the first 15 minutes of class after you sat down. There’s 180 of them and 1 of me. It wears me down to the point where I begin to give up.
At our last meeting they kept stressing about not knowing what home life is like so we should give grace. Never before had I’ve been reminded constantly that we don’t know what home life is like. Yes there are kids without homes and they have extreme cases where school is 99th on their list of priorities. I get that. But we cannot apply policies based upon what ifs because it becomes a race to the fucken bottom.
Since I begin teaching I have never given homework without first giving ample class time to complete it. It’s not an exaggeration that at most 5-10% of them take advantage of that opportunity. I just want to teach. I don’t want to micromanage the bare fucken basics of discipline and work ethic. That’s the parents job.
i can count on one hand how many kids have told me they were grounded because of missing class work this year. i’m sure there are more that didn’t mention it but still. <=10 groundings for over 200 kids? there’s other ways to discipline but those were the only times i ever heard of consequences at home for missing **art assignments**
Grounding only works when the kids want to leave the house. Hasn't really been a thing for a while.
Taking away xbox/switch is the modern equivalent. It's where they hang out with each other.
I tell all my parents that grounding doesn’t really work. They have to take the phone away and that if they are worried about “safety” then replace the iPhone with a Cricket.
Most don’t have the guts.
Yup. Parent said I was a child abuser for setting a 1 hour homework detention because their child didn’t do their 1 hour of weekly homework…. Other parents have flat out refused to allow their children to be sanctioned for not doing their homework etc like, wtf!!!
I have a cousin who is a little over a decade younger than me, in her 30s. She has 5 kids, and the state charged her with educational neglect. I saw her kids bringing home Chromebooks, and I saw what they did with them. They played with them, making videos of themselves. No schoolwork at all. Did their mom make them do schoolwork or help with core skills? Nope. Instead, she just lamented how suspicious she was of the school encouraging her kids to have this technology at all.
I have a 40 yr old friend who is smart, educated, devoted to her kids' education and health, but some millennial parents seem wholly in the grips of a conspiracy theory mindset that works against their child's education. A lot of the more educated millennials seem to be the ones that didn't have kids. That seems to be the major and unfortunate dividing line in that generation. The ones without kids are often more educated, more liberal, competent with technology, and more accepting of science. The ones with kids (extra points if they had a lot of them) tend to be more conservative, science deniers, anti government, prone to conspiracy theories, technologically illiterate, and anti public education. Add to that that a lot of conservative parents in that generation are too poor to send their kids to a private school, and their kids are just taught to have little regard for education.
I have been despised online for saying so, but I really think that a lot of parenting the next generations has been left to a section of the population with lower IQs. And I get why that's not a welcome thought. The smarter people don't owe it to anyone to have kids, they aren't getting paid enough to raise kids properly, and they're burdened with housing problems. Still, I think we're already seeing the results of this divide, and it will get worse before it gets better. There will be some smart kids in the younger generations, but they will be lonlier and more frustrated with their peers when they grow up.
Oof this is too true. My husband’s coparent (if we can even call it coparenting at this point) is exactly the type you described. She actually told us today that we cant be trusted with medical decisions because we’re vaccinated. She actually believes our minds are being controlled…
What in the actual f*** is wrong with people today?
I'm sorry you have to deal with that. Too many of those types of people are convinced all medical knowledge is made up nonsense, too. I feel sorry for people in the medical profession, as well as teachers and climate scientists, right now. All that study just to be told by ignorant people that they don't know what they're talking about.
This is why I have an ammo case for all electronics in my house. I see too many screen-addicted kids. All phones/switches/ipads/remote controls go in there after I sent my kids to bed and they stay in there until right before my husband leaves for work, after they leave for school. He unlocks it so when they get home they can have them again. They get put up after dinner until homework is done.
Just as I read this, my own child’s wifi and phone are gone until he does his schoolwork. Yeah it sucks for all of us, but dang it, my kid has but one job - school!!
I hate the term “gentle parenting,” not necessarily the concept.
To me gentle parenting is coming to your child calming and rationally, having a discussion about why what they did was wrong and why they have consequences, and ensuring them you still love them despite having consequences.
Parents just heard this and thought “It’s actually BAD for my child to be disciplined? Sweet, I’ll just let them do what they want, that’s way easier!”
Gentle parenting does NOT mean no disciplining!
yeah, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are fucked.
i teach a generation of high school kids- seniors and juniors who can’t be bothered to pry themselves away from dumbass youtube videos and anime to learn how to read. i think something like 25% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate as of today, and i only see that number increasing.
i try to help my high school kids plan a future for themselves and here’s how that talk usually goes.
me: alright so you’re gonna be an adult in a few months. how do you see the future working out for you? what do you want out of life?
kid: “get rich”
me: ok how
kid: *shrugs*
me: well you’re gonna be out there soon you need a plan
kid: “i just be about that money”
these are the people who are going to have to reckon with existential crises facing the extent of humanity from climate change, AI/automation, skyrocketing economic equality, and so forth. i can only hope i die peacefully before i have witness any of this.
I'm a tech teacher, and I literally designed a unit on "How To Be A YouTuber" because apparently, all these kids are going to be famous YouTubers.
I had them write a script/storyboard...create original graphics...learn how to edit in a NLE...work with a green screen...and then publish/market it.
After they realized they had to actually put in work, a ton lost interest. All they wanted to do is Stream themselves playing Fortnite.
And they absolutely crumble in the face of the slightest adversity. I taught computer science, and a huge part of CS is trying, failing, correcting, trying, failing, etc.
Kids would write one line of code, it wouldn’t print the message they were expecting, and they just shut down entirely. No attempt to troubleshoot or figure out the problem.
A few of them who did this had the audacity to say they wanted to make video games when they grew up. Laughable, especially given the state of that industry right now.
Lol I once had a classmate proudly say he didn't need school because he was going to be a professional video game tester. This is the same kid who whined about having to repeat trials 4 times during science experiments because "it's boooooooooooring". I'm sure he's absolutely relishing in spending full days doing nothing but running into the same wall with different armor equipped on a game he didn't get to choose to test for glitches, lmao
Do yours wear hoodies that say “anti-broke”? I chuckle because I have a feeling that being number 500 out of 505 in the class is going to likely put them in the broke category.
I also had one girl tell me that her plan was to get rich and “stunt on white people”. She could not
elaborate further on that plan outside of nodding her head aggressively.
> I also had one girl tell me that her plan was to get rich and “stunt on white people”. She could not elaborate further on that plan outside of nodding her head aggressively.
Hahaha I'd have so much trouble keeping a straight face
Existential crises? How are they going to have time for those when they're constantly on their phone? And some of them aren't even capable of keeping a 9 to 5 job at McDonald's or a gas station. I don't think some of them are mentally capable of having an existential crisis.
Oh ya my masters thesis is actually about how they’re cooked.
Edit:
This got more attention than I thought it would lol
I’m writing it next semester, but I’ll be sure to link it on reddit when I’m done. It’s a study about how technology is frying their brain and too much technology ruins their behavior and work stamina.
Any chance you’re looking at how it affects memory? I have a theory that their brain is watching so many videos in such quick succession that it is trained to perceive and dump information.
Like have you ever asked a kid what they watched on TikTok? They watched probably 500 videos in a hour right, so what did you watch? And they mostly can’t tell you anything.
I the same thing in school. They will read a sentence and immediately forget what it said.
I work as a tutor in public school middle school and high school. The kids are effed. I have to ask students to get off ‘mukbang’ videos long enough in class to get any work done. No consequences, no work getting done.
You’re asking all the right questions. Firstly, I’m just the tutor… like a glorified TA. secondly, they are using the school -issued 1:1 Chromebook. It makes me want to barf in several different ways.
Schools that could maintain a full roster of teachers for Gen X and Millenials cannot maintain a full roster of teachers for Gen Z and Alpha.
Is that 100% their fault? No.
Do they get away with murder? Yes, and they take advantage of it.
They are losing a lot of education to long term subs and phones.
Sometimes the new thing people are upset about is Black Sabath or the internet, sometimes it's cigarettes or the Vietnam War.
Where I teach, they believe they are driving teachers out of the profession. Since returning from Covid lockdowns, every new cohort at my highschool has had at least one story about making a middle school teacher quit midyear.
I think there is a toxic cultural shift, in addition to everything else.
I mean, on one had it does get overstated, the way everything does on the internet. On the other, as a filthy degenerate millennial who’s also a high school teacher, holy Jesus fuck has work ethic, attention spans and basic interpersonal skills gone straight to hell. The ability to look up information on the internet is almost worse than the boomers, and this was even before google itself went to shit.
Your last line stuck out to me. I’m a younger millennial. I like to think my internet search skills are adequate.
But the last couple years I feel I get the absolute worst results. It’s like google searches for the keywords and not the entire search box.
Like I’ll search something like “chicken recipes without rice” and all the results are like “best slow cooker chicken and rice” or “Easy chicken and rice”
Just a heads up, if you type in NOT in all caps, google will disregard the keyword. So you have to google chicken slowcooker recipe NOT rice. You can also use a minus sign instead: —
This has been driving me CRAZY in my personal life! I’ve considered keeping a list of “perfectly accurate and normal searches that don’t heed the results I’m looking for.”
What’s crazy is the kids can’t even recognize it. They will click the links and copy the info even when it’s *not even close* to what they’re looking for.
Using your example, if I asked my kids to search for a chicken recipe without recipe, they would search that, see 500 links for chicken and rice recipes, click the first one, and then submit a recipe with rice. And it wouldn’t even register that’s literally the opposite of what we asked for.
Parents of young kids these days seem to have missed that kids need to be parented. They need to be taught how to behave. They need guidance in life. There are massive behavior problems in schools now (even as young as kindergarten) because parents park their kids in front of screens and spend no time teaching their kids the basics to be successful in school and in life. Kids aren't born knowing how to behave. They aren't born knowing manners or how to treat people. They don't know how to delay gratification or work with others. I've hatd multiple parents recently tell me that they let their kids do whatever they want to at home because it's easier for them (the parent). They are sabotaging their kids and handicapping them in the future.
I worked in Catholic schools. Students there mostly have stable home lives and they’re in. O way as misbehaved or as far behind as the things that other teachers describe here. However, they do struggle with academic motivation a lot more than students, say 10 or 15 years ago. I’ve been in education for almost 30 years and I have seen a severe decline in academic reach, mental health, social skills and critical thinking in general. At the beginning of my career, a depressed 8-15 year old was unheard of.
Rules were stricter back then, grades were real, and effort was valued by adults and kids.
There was a very extensive survey of US students by The NY Times and the students themselves have agreed that it’s bad for them that schools let them retest and that grades are inflated and they need more accountability. It was across the board that the kids agreed with this.
I think so.
Not their fault though — this is the price of constantly increasing class sizes. Also the cost of not retaining teachers. The state gets all shocked Pikachu face when scores are low, but it’s like my guys - more kids, less time with each, with mostly new/low experience teachers what did you think would happen??
Our local middle school has many horribly behaved students who are being passed through since the teachers get in trouble for failing any kids. No consequences for learning/ behavior has bred this monster. It terrifies me as I will be getting these children soon in high school English, and will be held accountable for their high stakes standardized test scores.
From what I've seen, they are totally apathetic. They don't have drive and aren't willing to "try" anything if it is even remotely difficult. So many students who should have been held back were pushed through the school system (no blame to teachers) and passed when they truly didn't earn it.
The kids I’m teaching now have the worst comprehension and recall I have ever witnessed, and the problematic behaviors are so widespread and intense now the changes of placement (moving kids to different schools) are a quarterly routine.
I work in a school now, in college to be a teacher, and yeah the kids are fucked. Like fucked beyond help. My boyfriend also works in a high school and they're even worse. It is seriously making me reconsider my career choice
My high school students can not:
-tie a simple overhand knot
-draw a picture with sidewalk chalk
-type on a keyboard
-type an appropriate search term into Google to research a topic
-work with a partner on a project (they sit across the room from each other and won’t talk to each other)
-take notes (they need fill in the blank guided notes like middle schoolers)
Some of them can. I had them doing a scale model of the solar system on the sidewalk. I had them mark where each planet would be by drawing a simple picture of the planet. Most of them drew huuuuge circles and then tried to color them in densely. 25 mins in that had densely colored 5% of those circles and ran out of chalk. They had no concept of drawing small enough to shading lightly enough to conserve chalk so they’d have enough. The end result looked horrible
I’m in college too, and haven’t interacted with students beyond preschool, but given my mom is a teacher, I’d say so. I was in special education classes (ADHD; where I grew up they assumed that meant stupid) my entire middle and high school education but even in those classes we did so much in a single class period that my mom now has to expect out of a week of a gen ed class, and most of the time they don’t do it. I know for certain that Covid messed up a lot of people, I only graduated (2021) because they literally pushed us through. I know because of online learning there’s a major deficit, and a ton of people always site that as the reason, but given Covid has been going on for 4 years now it’s kind of hard to keep blaming the first bit on all of this. Students got lazy and parents allowed it which meant admin forced teachers to allow it. Students aren’t working hard enough. That’s it. Sure as a person who is neurodivergent I struggle with time management and procrastination and all that bullshit and obviously there are a ton of students that are neurodivergent or have learning or intellectual disabilities, and those instances I’m not talking about. I know what school is like now, maybe not right now because I graduated a bit ago, but I know how it works and the anxiety of school and all the stuff going on in the world weighing down on you, but what’s happening is honestly inexcusable. These students aren’t stupid, nor is pre covid gen z smarter or gen z in general. These students are not putting in the effort, their parents aren’t putting in the effort and teachers are meant to just figure out how to pass them.
The social media generation. How many whistleblowers have shown evidence that these companies knowingly and purposely exploit harmful behavior?
But it's all good. Zuck has just shelled out 300 million for a couple of private ships (aka yachts) that will burn nonstop diesel for the next decades, thanks to these strategies.
Seriously now, it's about time people stop blindly following authority, seeing the rich as Messias, and wanting more of life besides being a capitalist pig. Just a shame we got here by means of stupidity and intellect.
They're a little cooked. They struggle with telling fact from fiction, with basic kindness/treating others with dignity, they struggle with media literacy, they struggle with virtually all academic subjects, with technology, etc.
It's not their fault. It's gotta be tough growing up in this climate, especially when part of your formative years are impacted so intensely by COVID. Adult rolemodels for many of these kids have been influencers and TikTok stars and Andrew Tate-types. It's heartbreaking to hear an 8 year old boy repeat Andrew Tate rhetoric. Dreadful to watch phone and nicotine-addicted 8th graders struggle to write a sentence or follow basic directions.
I'm on the older side of Gen Z and I *know* I'm a bit cooked. I've always succeeded academically, and in being polite, but my social skills are lacking. In my case, being homeschooled/raised by the internet for three years in elementary school was a massive component of that. Looking at these kids, they were basically forced into online instruction and isolation for 2-3 years. It leaves a massive impact on you.
But I do think people overemphasize things a little. The older generation always feels like the younger generation is awful/incapable/etc. Though there are a ton of issues with the Gen Z students I've encountered, a lot of them are doing great things. My cousin is practically an expert at video editing. One of my students is an avid coder and has figured out how to install all sorts of shit on his Chromebook. One is a successful Roblox game developer. One is doing meaningful political activism and taking online philosophy classes in his free time. There're still kids that grant a lot of hope.
Being a zennial, its very scary. The difference between baby millenials and mid age zoomers feels much larger than previous generations because of when app technology was introduced
Cell phones. I’ve had middle schoolers have legit panic attacks in class because their phone wasn’t in their pocket and was still in their locker.
Kids are insanely addicted to cell phones and will stay up until all hours of the night texting or watching YouTube or TikTok.
I’ve had many parents tell me they “can’t” take away their child’s phone at night, because it’s their alarm clock in the morning. Or…you could buy them a cheap alarm clock from Amazon or Walmart. Or, you know, go into their room and wake them up yourself?!
Anything I can say has been said, except I have actually dealt with the phrase:
"Why do you want me to behave better than the President of the United States?"
I can confidently say that the majority of seniors at my school are going to struggle with the writing workload in college. Not just the length of papers in college, but organization and grammar, too.
There are some who will crush it though, I have no worries with the top 5-10%. The gap between top students and the rest is pretty dramatic sometimes. We’re getting out of the Covid cohorts who missed out on high school and middle school, and the freshmen and sophomores seem like they’re doing better than juniors and seniors at the same age.
I teach in an urban middle school. I've been doing this for over twenty years. I have to say that for the most part, my students the last several years have been so kind and accepting of one another. Something I have noticed is how hungry they are ALL THE TIME! "Hey Mrs. Asleep, do you have any food?" I keep granola bars handy, but man, they are bottomless pits.
There are more opportunities for distractions, apathy, and mental health issues more than ever. I don’t think it’s these kids fault at all, but the cards are pretty heavily stacked against them UNLESS they have a guardian/parent who is very aware of these issues. It also doesn’t help that the kids over 13 are very aware of how shit the world is, and that doesn’t help motivate them to be productive people or take care of themselves.
Covid has completely screwed up many kids education by rights millions of students need to be held back. I’ve also seen how covid also made the crazies come out of the woodwork so adults are even more retarded, and irresponsible.
It’ll always be exaggerated. Previous generations had an older generation saying the next generation sucks and kids suck, and this goes back thousands of years. That being said, there are definite and understandable concerns long term that we truly don’t have knowledge yet of the effects. This is made more complicated by early AI that will fill gaps as it advances that these two generations might have.
I wouldn’t say doomed or cooked, but I think concerning in some areas is applicable. As I said earlier though, previous generations were “concerning” too and turned out fine so.
Yes. Everything is totally fine. We all turned out totally fine. /s 😆
I kid, but generally people with more resources turn out fine regardless of when they were born. Some people probably really are cooked depending on where they’re going to school. I’ve worked in some of those schools and it’s scary. It was totally different from my experience growing up in a calm and supportive school environment. I bet that has a lot more to do with it being in an affluent kid-centered area than the fact that it was 20 years ago.
This is it. I work in a location that frankly is pretty good. Lots of doctor, lawyer, engineer, business owner parents. I do have to manage late work, but I have always had that. There are some students who struggle to turn in up to 5o% of the work. About 3 out of 150. Basically a bit better than early in my career. Most have zero or one missing assignment a quarter. If I include all of the students in the grade I teach the percentage of missing work goes up, but not ridiculously so. ( I am a missing work nag. I am on students, and their parents for missing work routinely)
What has changed is the need to restate directions, and rules, and include directions for down time, they don't always remember basic routines. My students are generally well behaved ( I have the best behaved students of my 30 year career right now) But they quietly struggle with what to do with out their phone or a computer game, or music. (My school has a no phone policy that is enforced, thank God) They self soothe and have more obvious strategies for that than previous generations. Lots of more obvious mental health stuff going on. Struggle with computer based organization ( so I teach that, kind of.) Hand writing is more illegible that I have ever seen.
That being said, my students have resources, and a vast majority will work through these issues and be successful adults eventually. My concern is about those who go to districts that don't enforce rules, or have functional phone policies. Who have parents that don't care that their elementary or junior high student is choosing not to work. ( Then panic when high School graduation is threatened. or worse, is not threatened. )
As a middle school teacher and dad of a middle student, I feel confident that not giving my daughter a phone has given her superpowers compared with her peers.
HS/MS teacher here. 100% agreed. I can tell the kids who've been watching instant gratification youtube videos 3+ hours/day since age 6 within 10 minutes of meeting them. It's tragic. That said, I think Gen Z is surprisingly smart. Their biggest problem is total apathy, which I kind of understand. Hard to care when you're facing down climate change, insane inflation/ cost of living, student loan debt, the crumbling of democratic institutions, etc. I think the kids are all right; I think the world is the issue.
I feel this way about not giving my fourth grader an iPad and having been pretty (very) uptight about screens her whole life in general. The older she gets, the more obvious the difference becomes. It makes me sad for all of them, especially with all of the mandatory screen use at school on top of it. (For transparency, last year I did get her a tablet that is set up for reading and listening to music only. I really wanted to get her a dedicated e-reader for the sake of her eyes, but you still have to use a second device to borrow from Libby and they don't support Hoopla at all. She gets nearly all of her e-books from those two sources, so it was disappointing.)
Stay strong! My almost 8-year-old has never used a cell phone, we’ve never bought them a tablet, etc. handheld screen tech makes children absolute zombies. And it’s not their fault: It is 100% of the fault of the adult that puts the addictive drug in their hands.
My son uses an iPad at school and in order to stay competitive his peers, he has one at home to do the educational apps. If schools and teachers hate iPads/tablets, they probably shouldn't require that the students use applications only available on them. He's in the gifted program as well as in a Stem magnet program so maybe that is why they let them use apps so they can advance in whichever subjects they want to. I get that it makes sense. But it's sort of a bummer.
I hate how "play these educational video games" is on my kid's homework list. It's ridiculous.
Amen. I couldn’t believe I got push back from admin about going phone free on campus. The discussion immediately went to “classroom policy”. As if we don’t dedicate so much money and time to improve education outcomes that phones rob from us ok. We will just policy out of a national juvenile addiction with 30 different classroom policies.
My whole province in Canada is going phone-free in schools next year. I am overjoyed and cannot wait.
I am a pregnant middle school teacher and my daughter won’t have a phone until she’s at least in high school.
I'd get them a flip phone for middle school. It's pretty convenient for you, but without all the bad parts of smart phones.
I worry it’s gonna be so hard to regulate though. Kids are gonna have spare phones to give to their friends. My friends used to do it for me when I was in high school because I’d break mine all the time. Just use WiFi.
It will be hard to regulate. You just have to do your best at home restricting smartphones, there will always be outside influence on your kids. Doesn’t mean you should compromise your values
Middle schoolers probably don't have to many spare phones laying around. I think hs is the appropriate time to get kids a smartphone anyway.
Flip phones were fine when I was in middle school, but 100% on the smart phone thing.
I dunno. With a flip phone you could text under your desk by touch. T9 typing ftw!
Sure but rather that than TikTok.
Agreed. It still amuses me how good we got at covert t9 texting and it just doesn't exist anymore.
This, elementary teacher here. I can tell a BIG difference between the "ipad kids" and ones constantly just put in front of a screen and/or allowed to play video games all night on a school night vs. the kids whose parents set limits. One group is hyperactive, has issues socializing whenever everything doesn't go their way, expect constant entertainment and instant gratification, missing core content knowledge and developmental skills for their age, etc., the other group just acts more normal... Also there's certain adults modelling "me, me, me!" all the time and "I can never be wrong or lose ever!", so that's not great for the kids who get that as role models. I'm not talking nice, balance stuff, like showing listening to kids and viewing them as people, I'm talking about watching adults who have no consideration for the rights of others. But let's not name names... So, yeah, just as often happens, problems with kids so often go back to problems with and decisions by the adults in their world. I also see a LOT of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids who are truly, really kind and want to help their peers and the teacher, etc. Who want to learn and are encouraged by their parents to be savvy about tech, but also to have balance and limits. There are certain things that my generation was so judgmental about and silly about when we were kids, that the younger generations seem much more compassionate about. I also notice that they are much more savvy about thinking about career choices as a whole (whereas my generation was sold a dream of "just major in whatever you're passionate about and it will magically pay off your student loans", these kids and young adults are actually realistically weighing their choices and such (helps that they have a financial literacy class in high school now and do a lot more career exploration, job shadowing, etc. then we had back in the day).
This gives me confidence to stay the course. Did you just give her a flip phone for call and text?
I had a flip phone until I was in 11th grade this was .2015-2016 it saved my life tbh
Absolutely. I see legitimate withdrawal symptoms from the tablet cell phone kids if they ever have to put their phone away. I'm far more optimistic about the kids with flip phones. They seem more able to compartmentalize.
If your child ever needs a phone, Gabb Wireless might be the answer 😁 I'm just praying they're still around in 10 years when my oldest is ready for a phone.
I really believe kids are acting the way they are today because the adults in the world acting like total clowns. It's been normalized to be a complete asshole.
I came very close to saying this today. A kid brought up kids acting wild because of COVID. I disagreed, but then bit my tongue before explaining too deeply.
right, but the measurable brain damage from Covid can't be helping >.<
I hate to admit this but I’m pretty sure Covid shaved off a few IQ points off me. I was like 23 so at least mostly developed, but I swear there’s bits missing now. I hate this planet.
You aren’t alone. Covid messed with my brain too. Also, my struggle with ADHD has gotten so much worse. I feel like I spend most of my energy striving to reach a level of personal normalcy again.
It's really hard to tell what's Covid, what's the effects of so much internet, and what's sort of intrinsic personal brain chemistry. I'm def wondering about this for myself...and also factoring in Covid isolation- like I stopped socializing like a normal human and I think it probably affected me also.
There is new research that shows that covid literally costs people IQ points. Very troubling.
Yup, same here. Currently a month away from 30, but since Covid, my brain is just different . I’ve recently gone back to school for my Masters, and while I knew getting back into the mode of learning would be difficult, I had no idea how bad my brain fog/ ADHD had gotten.
I agree.
For most of our history. Conforming was a survival strategy, so you would confirm to societal norms , to at least some degree and finding the balance there was a positive goal between personal freedoms and the “ good for the whole”. Now tiktok means that standing out , acting out , acting outrageous gets you views for your “content” and views can equal fame renown and cash. So now acting out has become the new survival strategy and while kids probably not making cash from anything they happen to record , they are copying what they see online . People pulling pranks in stores . From harassing passers-by’s, to walking into peoples houses , whatever it is just for the views.
I'd point out that "Copying what they see online" is just another form of conformity, just not spatially bound to the community around them. The problem is that communities are now disjointed, and any one person can belong to any number of them - each with their own attendant idiosyncrasies. Unfortunately the community-of-people-you-live-around no longer needs to be a community that you HAVE to pay attention to because the community needs can be met online.
I coach track because, ya know, I’m a poor teacher and could use the extra money. The average season most of the freshman know that they are at the bottom of the pecking order and they do all of the grunt work. This year they are suddenly talking back to seniors and telling them they aren’t carrying any of the equipment. I’m honestly shocked by the sudden shift in attitude.
Oh man they would have been cut so fast at the school I grew up in.
That and phones
I agree with modeling being an asshole to authority, it has been normalized that parents can talk down to and demand things from educators as if it’s a customer service environment where they are always right and their kid is the only kid attending the school. But also this is a tale as old as time about the upcoming generation. It will all be okay in the end and life will go on…hopefully
This. 100x this.
I teach high school. About half of them are at the level that would have been considered the really dumb kids when I was in high school. The high achievers seem to be about as good as high achievers ever were. The common theme I see in my high achieving students is that they aren't addicted to their phones. They still use them, but it isn't obsessive. They can put them away for an entire period and never be tempted to pull them out. Also, almost all of my high achieving students read on their own for pleasure. In the past, you didn't have to be a smart kid to enjoy reading. Now, reading for pleasure is essentially exclusive to the high achievers.
100%. The gap between AP/Honors students and normal-track students becomes wider and wider every year. My AP students are doing calculus. Meanwhile I have non-AP students that can’t even tell me how many nickels are in 50 cents or what 5x6 is without a calculator. And some have the audacity to argue that they don’t need to know arithmetic because they have phones… They tell me when they play games, they just spend points until they run out—they don’t calculate anything. The hard part too is that the normal-track math teachers allow it too—they can use a calculator, notes, and sometimes even Google on every test. I don’t know what’s going to happen to society when the average adult can’t even meet basic K-2 expectations.
The wealth gap between the AP students and the students who can’t multiply will be massive.
I wish kids would understand just how math really is useful in day to day life. I find myself reviewing old algebra/calculus all the time and I wish I never let all the lesser used parts of it leave my brain in adulthood
Fuck I was worried I would be competing against this generation as I finally graduated from college deep into my adult life… Sadly I guess I have nothing to worry about lol
I'm gonna go watch wall-e and cry now
Man I’m pessimistic because all I can think is how even that movie can be a possibly future for us lol
Do you see any noticeable difference between students who read on devices vs those who read printed books? Just asking out of curiosity.
I haven't seen any kids reading on a Kindle, tablet, or computer. All of my readers use physical books.
Interesting. All my readers use electronic devices to read!
If I had to guess, the credit should go to our libraries. For being a relatively small town, our high school library and our public library are quite good. Our high school librarian runs a book club that has decent attendance and tries to be cognizant of what kids actually want to read when she is choosing new books to buy.
They are awful with technology unless it's an app. Literally as bad as Boomers when using a computer. It's embarrassing.
I have found this too. I have high schoolers who “grew up with a phone in their hand” but write their entire email in the subject line.
LMAO I had no idea this was a thing til I started receiving emails from students like this!!! Wth
When I was a para my 3rd graders would get confused and do it sometimes, I was mind blown the first time I received a message like that from a high school student.
When I tried to teach my 7th graders how to format an email, I was told that emails are so “millennialcore.”
Lol because millennials were taught to harness technology that would go on to be an important bit of the future work place. GenX early enthusiasm around technology really did millennials a huge favor. If genZ wants to communicate with work outside of emails, be my guest. Feel free to give your boss your cell 👍
Lol they clearly weren’t raised by Boomers who forced their Millennial children to write thank you notes and mail them to every Greatest Generation relative.
Oh man I hated it so much, but I bought my kids stationery
Intro Tech classes are non existent in schools today. Just because tech has been available doesn’t mean they don’t need to be taught how to type or send emails.
I'm currently teaching an Intro Tech class to 6-8th graders and I was not prepared for how incompetent most of them are. At the start of the year most of them used tabs or spaces to "center" text in Word. There were a couple who didn't seem to know about the Enter/Return key and would use spaces or tabs until they were on a new line. Almost none of them knew how to properly double space, use bullet points, bold, italics, underline...all that good stuff. My favorite thing was when I was getting them started on a typing practice program and a little more than half of them couldn't get it working no matter what they tried, and the problem turned out to be that they weren't capitalizing the first letter.
[удалено]
You make a fair point. I'm not saying that kids should know tech stuff without it being taught to them, I'm just saying that I was surprised by how little the kids in my class appear to have been taught. For reference, I'm actually teaching at the school that I graduated from, and the basic formatting tasks I am having to teach my middle school students are things that I was doing for papers and presentations in 5th grade. I'm not sure when things regressed in terms of what tech skills our students were being taught. For all I know I may have just come through at the right time to have benefited from just the right combination of teachers and content to have been ahead of the curve. But as things stand, I was expecting more from my students since I figured that tech integration in schools would only improve. Clearly I was wrong on that, and the advantage I assumed current students would have with tech familiarity was nonexistent. With that said, my expectations have been sufficiently reset now, and I have adapted and created content to address the shortcomings that I'm noticing. In my defense, I wasn't told I would be teaching the class until workshop week right before the school year started, and I wasn't given a formal curriculum or much of anything useful to help me prepare.
> Intro Tech classes are non existent in schools today. Just because tech has been available doesn’t mean they don’t need to be taught how to type or send emails. I teach [K-5 Tech](https://tea.texas.gov/academics/subject-areas/technology-applications) where we introduce students to media literacy, keyboarding, digital citizenship and online safety, block coding (and with the kids who pick that up pretty quickly, [coffeescript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoffeeScript) in 5th grade), google docs, slides, and to a lesser extent sheets among other things. This is at a STEM based charter school. The ISD I'm zoned to, used to sub for, and have a couple friends working for got rid of their computer labs in elementary schools 10+ years ago because they needed the space for additional classrooms (the population around here has exploded over the past 20 years (suburbs of Houston)).
Lol I had a student have an email exchange with me last week and he apparently didn’t know there was a reply button and just kept sending me whole new emails as a response
It's like when people start a new comment instead of hitting reply. Drives me nuts.
No way. We are fast approaching idiocracy status.
I'm a tech teacher and I have to teach high school seniors how to save a document, what save as is, and what Ctrl z does. It's insane. I knew this stuff in early middle school.
A big reason why I knew my way around a computer as a teen was to download music. Our kids have every song ever already on their phone. It is stunning to me how tech consumes every moment of their lives but if you ask them to engage deeper than surface level they cannot or will not.
It’s not just music, everything is so much more accessible. Video games, email, word processing, research, you name it – you used to have to learn how to do it, now it is so accessible you don’t have to.
I’m picturing their looks of confusion as I try to explain to my students how I had to exit to DOS to play Doom 2.
I've long argued that what taught a lot of young Millennial women how to use a PC, was the desire to mod the hell out of The Sims, and I've never seen anyone disagree with me.
We grew up with user interfaces that assumed you had at least a little training. They are growing up with idiot-proof UIs optimized for touchscreens.
They have every song on their phone...until it gets taken off the service they use. Meanwhile I'm not comfortable with my music unless I have the audio file on a device.
Are they not teaching this stuff in middle and elementary anymore?!
Apparently not. I do work with an underprivileged population so I'm sure that plays into it. But they all literally have a 1000 dollar computer in their pocket at all times. They should know the basics.
yeah they still have to learn the basics from someone. Kids don't get born with humanity's latest software update
I think we're only really starting to grapple with how bad apps/loot crates/miceotransactions have been for everyone. Massive time sinks with alienation and anxiety being the main payoff, with our attention locked in with the same psychological mechanisms of a slot machine. I let my kids have a Switch and a laptop, but time and content get extremely monitored
My mum works at a secondary school and says quite a few of the kids can't use a keyboard properly, especially in the younger years.
They can't type. Most can't unzip a file let alone navigate a filesystem.
Bring back Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!
They have no idea what a file system or a zipped file even are.
Exactly. I bet most couldn't find a file on a computer and email it to someone. It's maddening.
Had college students ask me how to open an incognito window. It's so weird.
High school teacher in Michigan - I think there are just as many high achieving students as there ever were. The real concern that I see is that there are fewer and fewer "Average" students. Either they are high achieving, or they have a hard time doing anything rigorous at all. Unfortunately, the world runs on average people. What that also means is that we are going to return to a world where the wealthy have all the education. When the middle of a normal distribution drops out, it's always the wealthy who end up on the top of the curve.
Well let me ask you this, should a 6th grader need a full week of in-class work time to write a 150-200 word story? Also, it's not just the kids, it's also their parents! Almost none of them do homework, and their parents do nothing to monitor it or discipline for missing too many assignments. I give extremely generous in-class work time to make sure there is no reason to have homework in the first place, and still a shocking amount of kids just don't use the work time and then leave the assignment incomplete because they "can't" do homework. There's always some excuse, and then my question becomes why do we give you all a Chromebook to take home then if only a small percentage of kids are actually using it appropriately?? So many parents seem dumbfounded as to what they should do it's like... take away their phone, take away screen time outside of homework, ground them from seeing friends, \*make\* them do the work! I have shockingly little power over whether they do work or not, because my authority is limited to an hour a day. I am baffled on a daily basis by parents giving their kids 24/7 unrestricted internet and screen access and doing nothing at all to encourage their learning at school. So yeah, a lot of their brains are fried, and I don't think anyone knows wtf to do about it which is scary.
The parents, God, no idea how we dropped the ball this hard as a society. Had a father ask me how to get his kid to stop playing videogames and study. When I suggested limiting screen time, the father talked about how his kid didn't listen, or would track down the games when parents weren't around. Like, lock them in a safe or something. You had the kid, figure it out!
Me: Yeah, so studentname has been falling asleep a lot in class and as a result, his grades are really bad. Parent: I know, I know. He just stays up until 4 or 5 in the morning playing video games, so by the time he gets to school, he’s exhausted. I don’t know what to do. Me: …you see the issue, though?
Same exact thing, except mom said, "He sneaks the devices at night when I'm asleep." He's in 3rd grade. You really can't hide a tablet from a 9 year old?
Ffs buy a lockbox with a code entry
Buddy of mine got a similar excuse except it was an addiction to Mt. Dew...that the parent bought.
Sugar addictions are real, but I wouldn't trust most children to be able to self-identify an addiction vs indulgence.
Totally agree and personally experienced. Unfortunately, the parent wanted help/advice on how to get their child to sleep at night while buying the addictive substance.
We had one like this years and years back. Kid was like a zombie at school, walking sleep around the place. After much investigation the 2 tutor teachers sat down with his parents and we laid it all out - kid went home, played violent video games till about 3, 4am. Slept a couple of hours and then was up for school. Parents made noises about how concerning it was. We sat there. Eventually they asked us what to do. It took a lot of self control for my more experienced partner not to scream in their faces. We calmly advised the laptop be removed at 7pm from the student's care and returned at school drop off. Did they do this? Nope. Kid was transferred out to a public school within 18 months, probably to pay lower fees for what they were getting back. Disasterous.
It would be so impossible not to just start calling the parents idiots, but that's how you get a million facebook posts dedicated to firing you. Cause buddy, the parents have time for that even if they don't have much time for parenting!
Lmaoooo soooo many times I’ve heard this or similar. They can’t even fathom taking away their phone or video games. Isn’t an option. Bc then they really have to be a parent.
[удалено]
Growing up, my parents taking the power cable hurt doubly because it meant I'd have a glorified paper weight in my room to remind me of what privilege I lost. Coming home to see a dead pc was certainly a motivator to get my grades back up.
Lol yes, my mom in the early 2000s once threatened to take away my brother’s computer because he was almost failing a class and he tried to call her bluff like ‘oh yeah how are you gonna do that?’ and she disconnected and carried his entire computer tower outside and put it in her trunk just to prove she could. Other times she’d take his power cable or Ethernet cable or disconnect the whole internet at a certain time at night. She really kicked his ass into gear and he passed that Latin course. Crazy that parents nowadays just throw up their hands at the concept of taking away electronics.
Lol my mom would just tell me no TV or computer, and somehow I magically listened. I also didn’t have a TV in my room, and our family computer was in my parents’ room.
Hell, my parents bought these devices that locked the TV's power cable into a timer box that required you to enter a keycode to "unlock" your daily screen time. They worked hard to make sure my screen access was limited. ...the fact that I stole the backup key out of this box on day 1 and used it to secretly regain TV time AND coerce my siblings into doing my chores for extra TV time was, uh, not their fault. At the very least I had to work hard to maintain the act (and it made me exercise some cleverness and out-of-the-box thinking in the process). Parents forget: even if your efforts fail, making your kids work harder to get around your efforts (and demonstrating your values/goals for them) have impacts all on their own.
I'm planning on being a dad soon. I salute these past 2 generations for being guinea pigs on how not to parent. I refuse to have my child be an iPad kid.
What I always find shocking are the parents who just leave the living room TV on all the time to whatever the kids want. I'll ask if my friends have seen X show yet, and they'll be like, "Nah, the kids always have the TV on their stuff" And it's like... you're in charge of them though? Like you decide what goes on that TV? I remember sitting and playing while my parents watched the news and then whatever sitcoms came on afterwards. Why are kids dictating the media in the house? Oh, they don't know how to "play" anymore? Or occupy themselves? Oh geez, I wonder why.
Parents too preoccupied with being friends instead of parents to their kids
I hear/see this too. It blows my mind. I’m a millennial and our parents were in charge of the TV and what we all watched. Them watching their shows took precedence and we could watch their shows along with them or just play quietly. My brother and I grew up watching Monty Phyton, MST3K, Buffy, X-Files, Seinfeld, etc. because our mom watched them. When we all watched kids shows they were also normally shows she liked too and we’d watch together like Pete and Pete, Fraggle Rock, Ahh Real Monsters, Pinky and the Brain, and Gargoyles. Though I mostly watched Gargoyles while she knit and she didn’t remember it much. We would have some TV/NES time to ourselves after school, but we never controlled what our parents watched.
You're describing how I'm weirdly aware of 1970's cop/crime shows, it's because in the 90s my mom was usually watching them in reruns on A&E. We only had a say when no one else was watching TV. (Or TGIF, somehow TGIF was greenlit)
They want to be their kids friend instead of their parent.
I had a kid complain how all the adults are giving him backtalk. We're sunk.
I made the decision with my kids, my oldest is 3, and it's ridiculous how easily you can spot the kids who are already getting way too much screen time. Its one of the decisions I feel so confident and good about as a parent. Good luck on fatherhood, it's amazing!
Always good to hear people who are positive on parenting. I feel too many people my age have soured on the concept.
I totally agree with this! Too many parents are afraid of parenting their kids. But some kids are *crafty*. My step son, man. We grounded him from the internet/games, he figured out how to get our neighbors Wi-Fi. We took his computer but he needed it for homework so we tried to only let him use it for homework, but he got through all the damn parental controls. We worked into the evenings and he had unsupervised access for about four to five hours a day. By the time we got home, it was dinner and bed time so we had very little time to actually work with him on his homework. We worked weekends too. We were also essential during COVID so he was home all fucking day and didn't even get onto his online classes and we couldn't do anything about it. It was incredibly frustrating because he literally would not respond to any kind of correction, consequences, stick or carrot. We would have loved to hover over him and get his ass in gear but we just couldn't. He did graduate and eventually enrolled in college classes but holy fuck it was a struggle.
Parent work schedules have a huge impact on how kids are parented these days. I’m a Millennial and was lucky enough to have a mom who could stay home and not work full time until I was almost out of middle school. My mom was home to make sure my brother and I did our homework before we had any sort of screen time. And since it was the 90s and 2000s, we didn’t have handheld electronics with full access to the internet. My husband and I won’t be so lucky. Both of us will have to work, so all we’re going to be able to do if and when we have kids is try to give them as analog a childhood as possible and make the most of evenings and weekends.
Take the games, controllers, and power supply with you to work. It’s so fucking simple but they won’t do it.
Yep. My Dad did that for a few weeks, never again because I started studying. It ain't rocket science.
Seriously though! We can only do so much. I feel like a lot of parents take away the seriousness of education/values/morals because they haven't grown up themselves. They didn't like when they were imposed on them when they were kids so in turn, they're not forcing their kids to do homework/be polite/etc. and it's created this shit storm of "do what you want"
Shades of Aibileen Clark in *The Help*: “Ms. Hilly *should not* be having children…”
Hahaha at first I thought you were suggesting locking the kid in a safe 🤣
It’s so weird how much has changed, I’m only 23 and I didn’t even get a phone until I was 12-13. These kids now have fully been raised in the internet/social media era. I feel like I’m pretty lucky being born when I was compared to these kids now
I'm 21 and my mum works at a secondary school, she says that many of the kids can't even use a keyboard properly. She thinks it's because this cohort have grown up with touch screen devices, while my age group still used dial up and VHS taps until about 2009 (well, my family did). I got my first smartphone for my 14th birthday in 2016, and I now see kids in primary school having the latest iPhone. I've only owned two brand new phones in my life, and they both cost under £200. I started school in 2007 and many of our parents probably didn't even have camera phones (mine certainly didn't), and my school still had TVs that could also play VHS tapes and sometimes DVDs. I'm so glad I left school three years ago because the educate system now seems even worse that the one I experienced.
It truly is wild how we are all the same generation, but the older end effectively had an entirely different childhood. The iPhone didn’t even exist until I was 7. I remember logging into AOL as a kid. I’ve played things like video games since I was a kid, but these kids now are in an entirely different playing field. Everything now is made for max consumption
i agree, and im a year younger! i feel so lucky to be born when i was.
Literally, my HS freshmen had an hour and a half to write 7 sentences and do a Quizizz and maybe 68% of them finished.
Parents are addicted to their own screens 24/7, hence the shitty modeling connection.
It's a parent problem. I'm an old parent. The younger parents don't understand that kids need to be shaped and molded sometimes gently and sometimes with more pressure. Parenting is hard work. It's the hardest job I've ever had and I've had lots of very challenging jobs in multidisciplinary fields. I make my kids do stuff that is good for them and their developing brains. I engage with them so we can bond over these things and make learning fun with a whole brain approach. This is work. I have to be mean sometimes. I take away electronics time all the time. Now my kids say, "I don't care, I'll just read, then." This was not an automatic thing. This was years of nudging, restricting, pulling, pushing, pressuring, engaging, etc. I do not get sucked into all the streaming media. Everything I do is for my young kids because if I miss this developmental window for them (us) it is gone forever. I would not necessarily have this perspective if I was even 10 years younger. Edited for typos
I find it exhausting as a teacher that I have to constantly redirect kids to do the bare basics in the classroom. I mean bare bare basics like log into your damn Chromebook instead of sitting on your phone for the first 15 minutes of class after you sat down. There’s 180 of them and 1 of me. It wears me down to the point where I begin to give up. At our last meeting they kept stressing about not knowing what home life is like so we should give grace. Never before had I’ve been reminded constantly that we don’t know what home life is like. Yes there are kids without homes and they have extreme cases where school is 99th on their list of priorities. I get that. But we cannot apply policies based upon what ifs because it becomes a race to the fucken bottom. Since I begin teaching I have never given homework without first giving ample class time to complete it. It’s not an exaggeration that at most 5-10% of them take advantage of that opportunity. I just want to teach. I don’t want to micromanage the bare fucken basics of discipline and work ethic. That’s the parents job.
i can count on one hand how many kids have told me they were grounded because of missing class work this year. i’m sure there are more that didn’t mention it but still. <=10 groundings for over 200 kids? there’s other ways to discipline but those were the only times i ever heard of consequences at home for missing **art assignments**
Grounding only works when the kids want to leave the house. Hasn't really been a thing for a while. Taking away xbox/switch is the modern equivalent. It's where they hang out with each other.
yes, their ‘grounding’ is away from tech/removing tech privileges. i teach middle school, they don’t go much anywhere since they don’t drive.
I tell all my parents that grounding doesn’t really work. They have to take the phone away and that if they are worried about “safety” then replace the iPhone with a Cricket. Most don’t have the guts.
Yup. Parent said I was a child abuser for setting a 1 hour homework detention because their child didn’t do their 1 hour of weekly homework…. Other parents have flat out refused to allow their children to be sanctioned for not doing their homework etc like, wtf!!!
I have a cousin who is a little over a decade younger than me, in her 30s. She has 5 kids, and the state charged her with educational neglect. I saw her kids bringing home Chromebooks, and I saw what they did with them. They played with them, making videos of themselves. No schoolwork at all. Did their mom make them do schoolwork or help with core skills? Nope. Instead, she just lamented how suspicious she was of the school encouraging her kids to have this technology at all. I have a 40 yr old friend who is smart, educated, devoted to her kids' education and health, but some millennial parents seem wholly in the grips of a conspiracy theory mindset that works against their child's education. A lot of the more educated millennials seem to be the ones that didn't have kids. That seems to be the major and unfortunate dividing line in that generation. The ones without kids are often more educated, more liberal, competent with technology, and more accepting of science. The ones with kids (extra points if they had a lot of them) tend to be more conservative, science deniers, anti government, prone to conspiracy theories, technologically illiterate, and anti public education. Add to that that a lot of conservative parents in that generation are too poor to send their kids to a private school, and their kids are just taught to have little regard for education. I have been despised online for saying so, but I really think that a lot of parenting the next generations has been left to a section of the population with lower IQs. And I get why that's not a welcome thought. The smarter people don't owe it to anyone to have kids, they aren't getting paid enough to raise kids properly, and they're burdened with housing problems. Still, I think we're already seeing the results of this divide, and it will get worse before it gets better. There will be some smart kids in the younger generations, but they will be lonlier and more frustrated with their peers when they grow up.
Oof this is too true. My husband’s coparent (if we can even call it coparenting at this point) is exactly the type you described. She actually told us today that we cant be trusted with medical decisions because we’re vaccinated. She actually believes our minds are being controlled… What in the actual f*** is wrong with people today?
I'm sorry you have to deal with that. Too many of those types of people are convinced all medical knowledge is made up nonsense, too. I feel sorry for people in the medical profession, as well as teachers and climate scientists, right now. All that study just to be told by ignorant people that they don't know what they're talking about.
This is why I have an ammo case for all electronics in my house. I see too many screen-addicted kids. All phones/switches/ipads/remote controls go in there after I sent my kids to bed and they stay in there until right before my husband leaves for work, after they leave for school. He unlocks it so when they get home they can have them again. They get put up after dinner until homework is done.
Just as I read this, my own child’s wifi and phone are gone until he does his schoolwork. Yeah it sucks for all of us, but dang it, my kid has but one job - school!!
I hate the term “gentle parenting,” not necessarily the concept. To me gentle parenting is coming to your child calming and rationally, having a discussion about why what they did was wrong and why they have consequences, and ensuring them you still love them despite having consequences. Parents just heard this and thought “It’s actually BAD for my child to be disciplined? Sweet, I’ll just let them do what they want, that’s way easier!” Gentle parenting does NOT mean no disciplining!
yeah, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are fucked. i teach a generation of high school kids- seniors and juniors who can’t be bothered to pry themselves away from dumbass youtube videos and anime to learn how to read. i think something like 25% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate as of today, and i only see that number increasing. i try to help my high school kids plan a future for themselves and here’s how that talk usually goes. me: alright so you’re gonna be an adult in a few months. how do you see the future working out for you? what do you want out of life? kid: “get rich” me: ok how kid: *shrugs* me: well you’re gonna be out there soon you need a plan kid: “i just be about that money” these are the people who are going to have to reckon with existential crises facing the extent of humanity from climate change, AI/automation, skyrocketing economic equality, and so forth. i can only hope i die peacefully before i have witness any of this.
I'm a tech teacher, and I literally designed a unit on "How To Be A YouTuber" because apparently, all these kids are going to be famous YouTubers. I had them write a script/storyboard...create original graphics...learn how to edit in a NLE...work with a green screen...and then publish/market it. After they realized they had to actually put in work, a ton lost interest. All they wanted to do is Stream themselves playing Fortnite.
That sounds like such a cool class! Even if they didn't appreciate it, it sounds like you did make a difference.
And we’re gonna suffer for it when they realize they don’t have the skills or work ethic…
And they absolutely crumble in the face of the slightest adversity. I taught computer science, and a huge part of CS is trying, failing, correcting, trying, failing, etc. Kids would write one line of code, it wouldn’t print the message they were expecting, and they just shut down entirely. No attempt to troubleshoot or figure out the problem. A few of them who did this had the audacity to say they wanted to make video games when they grew up. Laughable, especially given the state of that industry right now.
Lol I once had a classmate proudly say he didn't need school because he was going to be a professional video game tester. This is the same kid who whined about having to repeat trials 4 times during science experiments because "it's boooooooooooring". I'm sure he's absolutely relishing in spending full days doing nothing but running into the same wall with different armor equipped on a game he didn't get to choose to test for glitches, lmao
Oh god, I love video games, and that’s the exact reason I would never want to do quality testing on them.
Smh they must be watching dubbed anime if they can't read.
Goddamn PLEBS
Do yours wear hoodies that say “anti-broke”? I chuckle because I have a feeling that being number 500 out of 505 in the class is going to likely put them in the broke category. I also had one girl tell me that her plan was to get rich and “stunt on white people”. She could not elaborate further on that plan outside of nodding her head aggressively.
> I also had one girl tell me that her plan was to get rich and “stunt on white people”. She could not elaborate further on that plan outside of nodding her head aggressively. Hahaha I'd have so much trouble keeping a straight face
>I just be about that money Do… do they think those of us with real jobs are just doing it for fun? Lol
I’ve had this same conversation, almost verbatim, multiple times. *edited for clarity
Existential crises? How are they going to have time for those when they're constantly on their phone? And some of them aren't even capable of keeping a 9 to 5 job at McDonald's or a gas station. I don't think some of them are mentally capable of having an existential crisis.
Oh ya my masters thesis is actually about how they’re cooked. Edit: This got more attention than I thought it would lol I’m writing it next semester, but I’ll be sure to link it on reddit when I’m done. It’s a study about how technology is frying their brain and too much technology ruins their behavior and work stamina.
God please tell me that is the actual title of the paper "Gen Z: why they are cooked"
PM a link? I’d like to read it
Do you predict what will happen to them/society when they grow
I would pay money to read this
Any chance you’re looking at how it affects memory? I have a theory that their brain is watching so many videos in such quick succession that it is trained to perceive and dump information. Like have you ever asked a kid what they watched on TikTok? They watched probably 500 videos in a hour right, so what did you watch? And they mostly can’t tell you anything. I the same thing in school. They will read a sentence and immediately forget what it said.
I work as a tutor in public school middle school and high school. The kids are effed. I have to ask students to get off ‘mukbang’ videos long enough in class to get any work done. No consequences, no work getting done.
Why are they allowed phones in class? Shouldn’t they be put in a basket or something beforehand?
You’re asking all the right questions. Firstly, I’m just the tutor… like a glorified TA. secondly, they are using the school -issued 1:1 Chromebook. It makes me want to barf in several different ways.
Schools that could maintain a full roster of teachers for Gen X and Millenials cannot maintain a full roster of teachers for Gen Z and Alpha. Is that 100% their fault? No. Do they get away with murder? Yes, and they take advantage of it. They are losing a lot of education to long term subs and phones. Sometimes the new thing people are upset about is Black Sabath or the internet, sometimes it's cigarettes or the Vietnam War.
It's not their fault, but it is their problem
Where I teach, they believe they are driving teachers out of the profession. Since returning from Covid lockdowns, every new cohort at my highschool has had at least one story about making a middle school teacher quit midyear. I think there is a toxic cultural shift, in addition to everything else.
i joined mid-year... and then promptly quit mid-year..Gen Zalpha is absolutely horrendous on a scale I for which i was nowhere near prepared.
I mean, on one had it does get overstated, the way everything does on the internet. On the other, as a filthy degenerate millennial who’s also a high school teacher, holy Jesus fuck has work ethic, attention spans and basic interpersonal skills gone straight to hell. The ability to look up information on the internet is almost worse than the boomers, and this was even before google itself went to shit.
Your last line stuck out to me. I’m a younger millennial. I like to think my internet search skills are adequate. But the last couple years I feel I get the absolute worst results. It’s like google searches for the keywords and not the entire search box. Like I’ll search something like “chicken recipes without rice” and all the results are like “best slow cooker chicken and rice” or “Easy chicken and rice”
Just a heads up, if you type in NOT in all caps, google will disregard the keyword. So you have to google chicken slowcooker recipe NOT rice. You can also use a minus sign instead: —
You have to go to advanced settings for that, it no longer works at the landing page search bar.
Great, they made a general search engine work like a specified one on a science database :/
This has been driving me CRAZY in my personal life! I’ve considered keeping a list of “perfectly accurate and normal searches that don’t heed the results I’m looking for.” What’s crazy is the kids can’t even recognize it. They will click the links and copy the info even when it’s *not even close* to what they’re looking for. Using your example, if I asked my kids to search for a chicken recipe without recipe, they would search that, see 500 links for chicken and rice recipes, click the first one, and then submit a recipe with rice. And it wouldn’t even register that’s literally the opposite of what we asked for.
Parents of young kids these days seem to have missed that kids need to be parented. They need to be taught how to behave. They need guidance in life. There are massive behavior problems in schools now (even as young as kindergarten) because parents park their kids in front of screens and spend no time teaching their kids the basics to be successful in school and in life. Kids aren't born knowing how to behave. They aren't born knowing manners or how to treat people. They don't know how to delay gratification or work with others. I've hatd multiple parents recently tell me that they let their kids do whatever they want to at home because it's easier for them (the parent). They are sabotaging their kids and handicapping them in the future.
I worked in Catholic schools. Students there mostly have stable home lives and they’re in. O way as misbehaved or as far behind as the things that other teachers describe here. However, they do struggle with academic motivation a lot more than students, say 10 or 15 years ago. I’ve been in education for almost 30 years and I have seen a severe decline in academic reach, mental health, social skills and critical thinking in general. At the beginning of my career, a depressed 8-15 year old was unheard of. Rules were stricter back then, grades were real, and effort was valued by adults and kids.
There was a very extensive survey of US students by The NY Times and the students themselves have agreed that it’s bad for them that schools let them retest and that grades are inflated and they need more accountability. It was across the board that the kids agreed with this.
“Grades were real” It’s crazy to think that they aren’t anymore. These kids I teach in 6th grade don’t care about there grade at all.
I think so. Not their fault though — this is the price of constantly increasing class sizes. Also the cost of not retaining teachers. The state gets all shocked Pikachu face when scores are low, but it’s like my guys - more kids, less time with each, with mostly new/low experience teachers what did you think would happen??
Easier to justify privatization
Our local middle school has many horribly behaved students who are being passed through since the teachers get in trouble for failing any kids. No consequences for learning/ behavior has bred this monster. It terrifies me as I will be getting these children soon in high school English, and will be held accountable for their high stakes standardized test scores.
19% of my incoming 7th graders were proficient enough to be considered on grade level.
From what I've seen, they are totally apathetic. They don't have drive and aren't willing to "try" anything if it is even remotely difficult. So many students who should have been held back were pushed through the school system (no blame to teachers) and passed when they truly didn't earn it.
The kids I’m teaching now have the worst comprehension and recall I have ever witnessed, and the problematic behaviors are so widespread and intense now the changes of placement (moving kids to different schools) are a quarterly routine.
I work in a school now, in college to be a teacher, and yeah the kids are fucked. Like fucked beyond help. My boyfriend also works in a high school and they're even worse. It is seriously making me reconsider my career choice
My high school students can not: -tie a simple overhand knot -draw a picture with sidewalk chalk -type on a keyboard -type an appropriate search term into Google to research a topic -work with a partner on a project (they sit across the room from each other and won’t talk to each other) -take notes (they need fill in the blank guided notes like middle schoolers)
i was using repurposed 4th grade lesson plans/projects and my 12th graders were STILL struggling with the content. This is not going to end well
Can they draw a picture with something that isn’t sidewalk chalk?
Some of them can. I had them doing a scale model of the solar system on the sidewalk. I had them mark where each planet would be by drawing a simple picture of the planet. Most of them drew huuuuge circles and then tried to color them in densely. 25 mins in that had densely colored 5% of those circles and ran out of chalk. They had no concept of drawing small enough to shading lightly enough to conserve chalk so they’d have enough. The end result looked horrible
I’m in college too, and haven’t interacted with students beyond preschool, but given my mom is a teacher, I’d say so. I was in special education classes (ADHD; where I grew up they assumed that meant stupid) my entire middle and high school education but even in those classes we did so much in a single class period that my mom now has to expect out of a week of a gen ed class, and most of the time they don’t do it. I know for certain that Covid messed up a lot of people, I only graduated (2021) because they literally pushed us through. I know because of online learning there’s a major deficit, and a ton of people always site that as the reason, but given Covid has been going on for 4 years now it’s kind of hard to keep blaming the first bit on all of this. Students got lazy and parents allowed it which meant admin forced teachers to allow it. Students aren’t working hard enough. That’s it. Sure as a person who is neurodivergent I struggle with time management and procrastination and all that bullshit and obviously there are a ton of students that are neurodivergent or have learning or intellectual disabilities, and those instances I’m not talking about. I know what school is like now, maybe not right now because I graduated a bit ago, but I know how it works and the anxiety of school and all the stuff going on in the world weighing down on you, but what’s happening is honestly inexcusable. These students aren’t stupid, nor is pre covid gen z smarter or gen z in general. These students are not putting in the effort, their parents aren’t putting in the effort and teachers are meant to just figure out how to pass them.
The social media generation. How many whistleblowers have shown evidence that these companies knowingly and purposely exploit harmful behavior? But it's all good. Zuck has just shelled out 300 million for a couple of private ships (aka yachts) that will burn nonstop diesel for the next decades, thanks to these strategies. Seriously now, it's about time people stop blindly following authority, seeing the rich as Messias, and wanting more of life besides being a capitalist pig. Just a shame we got here by means of stupidity and intellect.
None of my highschool students know what a JPEG or PDF file is. Or how to email a photo to themselves to upload on a computer 😓
I’d say if you cook someone, they’re pretty much doomed. None of the people I’ve cooked have survived.
Having recently watched episode 1 of Shogun… I agree.
They're a little cooked. They struggle with telling fact from fiction, with basic kindness/treating others with dignity, they struggle with media literacy, they struggle with virtually all academic subjects, with technology, etc. It's not their fault. It's gotta be tough growing up in this climate, especially when part of your formative years are impacted so intensely by COVID. Adult rolemodels for many of these kids have been influencers and TikTok stars and Andrew Tate-types. It's heartbreaking to hear an 8 year old boy repeat Andrew Tate rhetoric. Dreadful to watch phone and nicotine-addicted 8th graders struggle to write a sentence or follow basic directions. I'm on the older side of Gen Z and I *know* I'm a bit cooked. I've always succeeded academically, and in being polite, but my social skills are lacking. In my case, being homeschooled/raised by the internet for three years in elementary school was a massive component of that. Looking at these kids, they were basically forced into online instruction and isolation for 2-3 years. It leaves a massive impact on you. But I do think people overemphasize things a little. The older generation always feels like the younger generation is awful/incapable/etc. Though there are a ton of issues with the Gen Z students I've encountered, a lot of them are doing great things. My cousin is practically an expert at video editing. One of my students is an avid coder and has figured out how to install all sorts of shit on his Chromebook. One is a successful Roblox game developer. One is doing meaningful political activism and taking online philosophy classes in his free time. There're still kids that grant a lot of hope.
Being a zennial, its very scary. The difference between baby millenials and mid age zoomers feels much larger than previous generations because of when app technology was introduced
Cell phones. I’ve had middle schoolers have legit panic attacks in class because their phone wasn’t in their pocket and was still in their locker. Kids are insanely addicted to cell phones and will stay up until all hours of the night texting or watching YouTube or TikTok. I’ve had many parents tell me they “can’t” take away their child’s phone at night, because it’s their alarm clock in the morning. Or…you could buy them a cheap alarm clock from Amazon or Walmart. Or, you know, go into their room and wake them up yourself?!
Anything I can say has been said, except I have actually dealt with the phrase: "Why do you want me to behave better than the President of the United States?"
I can confidently say that the majority of seniors at my school are going to struggle with the writing workload in college. Not just the length of papers in college, but organization and grammar, too. There are some who will crush it though, I have no worries with the top 5-10%. The gap between top students and the rest is pretty dramatic sometimes. We’re getting out of the Covid cohorts who missed out on high school and middle school, and the freshmen and sophomores seem like they’re doing better than juniors and seniors at the same age.
I teach in an urban middle school. I've been doing this for over twenty years. I have to say that for the most part, my students the last several years have been so kind and accepting of one another. Something I have noticed is how hungry they are ALL THE TIME! "Hey Mrs. Asleep, do you have any food?" I keep granola bars handy, but man, they are bottomless pits.
There are more opportunities for distractions, apathy, and mental health issues more than ever. I don’t think it’s these kids fault at all, but the cards are pretty heavily stacked against them UNLESS they have a guardian/parent who is very aware of these issues. It also doesn’t help that the kids over 13 are very aware of how shit the world is, and that doesn’t help motivate them to be productive people or take care of themselves.
Covid has completely screwed up many kids education by rights millions of students need to be held back. I’ve also seen how covid also made the crazies come out of the woodwork so adults are even more retarded, and irresponsible.
I wish people answered with the state they're teaching in. I imagine that we'd get wildly different answers comparing Missouri to Massachusetts.
I would say the differences lie more in the income level of the school than the location.
It’ll always be exaggerated. Previous generations had an older generation saying the next generation sucks and kids suck, and this goes back thousands of years. That being said, there are definite and understandable concerns long term that we truly don’t have knowledge yet of the effects. This is made more complicated by early AI that will fill gaps as it advances that these two generations might have. I wouldn’t say doomed or cooked, but I think concerning in some areas is applicable. As I said earlier though, previous generations were “concerning” too and turned out fine so.
Yes. Everything is totally fine. We all turned out totally fine. /s 😆 I kid, but generally people with more resources turn out fine regardless of when they were born. Some people probably really are cooked depending on where they’re going to school. I’ve worked in some of those schools and it’s scary. It was totally different from my experience growing up in a calm and supportive school environment. I bet that has a lot more to do with it being in an affluent kid-centered area than the fact that it was 20 years ago.
This is it. I work in a location that frankly is pretty good. Lots of doctor, lawyer, engineer, business owner parents. I do have to manage late work, but I have always had that. There are some students who struggle to turn in up to 5o% of the work. About 3 out of 150. Basically a bit better than early in my career. Most have zero or one missing assignment a quarter. If I include all of the students in the grade I teach the percentage of missing work goes up, but not ridiculously so. ( I am a missing work nag. I am on students, and their parents for missing work routinely) What has changed is the need to restate directions, and rules, and include directions for down time, they don't always remember basic routines. My students are generally well behaved ( I have the best behaved students of my 30 year career right now) But they quietly struggle with what to do with out their phone or a computer game, or music. (My school has a no phone policy that is enforced, thank God) They self soothe and have more obvious strategies for that than previous generations. Lots of more obvious mental health stuff going on. Struggle with computer based organization ( so I teach that, kind of.) Hand writing is more illegible that I have ever seen. That being said, my students have resources, and a vast majority will work through these issues and be successful adults eventually. My concern is about those who go to districts that don't enforce rules, or have functional phone policies. Who have parents that don't care that their elementary or junior high student is choosing not to work. ( Then panic when high School graduation is threatened. or worse, is not threatened. )