Teaching, Part III

Students’ behaviors are much more sinister than they were just ten years ago.

It is a perennial feature of mankind to complain about the generation or generations that are younger than the person commenting on it. “Kids these days” has been a dismissive saying for a very long time. It seems that this has only accelerated in recent decades, and for understandable reasons: Humans have made giant leaps in technological progress since, say, 1900, and each subsequent generation is thus raised very differently than the ones previously. For example, Millennials grew up with the Internet and were the first generation to master cell phones, since those came out during the 1990s and early 2000s when they were in their formative years. But even Millennials are leap years behind today’s children, who have never known a time without smartphones and are often weaned on them when their parents want them to shut up in a restaurant.

It is therefore unsurprising that today’s generation of teachers will complain about the upcoming generation of students that they are teaching. A sharp observer could point to the centuries-old (this literally goes back to the Greek and Roman times) complaints about forthcoming generations and remark that the world hasn’t ended yet, despite prognostications of doom and gloom about the youngsters gaining power and running things.

Even still, today seems different. I teach the tail end of Generation Z students, who are typically born between 1997 and 2012. This generation is known for being “digital natives,” so-called because they have never known a time without full and easily accessible Internet and because of their fluidity with smartphone technology. The iPhone came out in 2009; as I mentioned earlier, consider how easily that technology distracts a child who is about to have a temper tantrum in public. At the touch of a screen, kids can be distracted for countless hours by YouTube videos, games, or even the filters on Snapchat pictures. From my observations, it appears that Generation X parents—who typically raise Gen. Z kids—use smartphones as a crutch to help them out in a pinch. That crutch quickly becomes like an extra limb, and instead of iPhones’ being tucked safely away behind a Break Glass In Case Of Emergency container, kids know how to shatter the glass and grab hold of them with ease.

Oddly enough, I belong to the same generation as my own students. I was born in 1998, at the very beginning of Gen. Z, and so I feel somewhat connected to my students. One of my students last year caught all my Phineas and Ferb references; SpongeBob is still widely viewed by middle schoolers today; and many of today’s most popular social media apps—Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok—were piloted by people my age.

And yet, behavior-wise, today’s kids could not be further from students when I was going to school.

I think the major difference between ten years ago and now is that students today seem to act out not merely to get more attention, but to purposefully be vindictive. Here’s one example: In my sixth period class the other day—my one challenging class this year—students could not figure out how to stop talking. They were supposed to be taking notes on plot—just two slides’ worth—but their mouths would not stop moving once one of them made some dumb remark or noise. So to keep them quiet, I kept saying “shush,” and made other similar noises to get them to shut their mouths for the ten minutes that I needed them to do so. One student—perhaps my most challenging this year—asked why I kept shushing them.

“Why do you keep shushing us?” he asked. When I didn’t reply, he looked at me again and said, “how would you feel if I kept asking you to shush? Huh? How would you like it if I asked you to shut up every five minutes?” I was luckily able to keep my cool and simply moved onto the next slide, but this has grated on me for days. It is not just what he said, but how he said it. He looked at me with mirth in his eyes, like he was enjoying his countless attempts to get under my skin, and was intentionally trying to provoke me to say something that I shouldn’t. This is the same student who kept going onto YouTube when he was supposed to be taking a test on his computer, and who, when I asked him several times to put his phone in his pocket, swore at me.

And this is not the only student who has exhibited this behavior. Several of my worst-behaved students last year also swore at me, and clearly behaved the way they did because they did not like me or teachers in general. Students, especially those in middle school, have never been angels. Middle schoolers are notoriously poorly behaved because they are mature enough to know lots of bad words but not enough to control themselves in public. But when I was in school, students behaved poorly to get attention from others. I can recall some classes that I was in that were rowdy, but few of the students in those classes were really trying to get under their teacher’s skin. Rather, they were bored with the lesson, or had a funny joke that they couldn’t wait to tell their friends until after school. Of course, that sort of benign behavior still happens; it’s just that a seemingly growing percentage takes the form of utter vindictiveness.

I really do not know where this comes from, or when the shift happened, or what to do about it. I think there are several compounding factors. The isolation arising from the COVID shutdowns surely did not help, but I suspect that this merely exacerbated existing trends rather than created new ones. I also think that smartphone parenting, to coin a term, contributes to this reckless and mean-spirited behavior. Plus, students today are exceedingly entitled. School districts seem to walk on eggshells: Students’ mental health, identities, and sense of belongingness are often priority number one, at least for schools in my district, rather than academic achievement or the creation and maintenance of a respectful learning environment. When you give students wide latitude to essentially be the bosses in school, it is no wonder that they behave like they are kings.

I don’t think this sense of entitlement stems solely from school districts. You can also see this in the way parents talk about their kids. When a teacher contacts a student’s parents, the parents blame the teacher just as often as they blame their own child. Sometimes parents will dispute the account of the teacher because their kid told them a different story (because, as you know, middle schoolers never lie). Sometimes parents insist that their child is different from the other kids who behave poorly because they have some ADHD or ADD or are on the Autism spectrum—as if these are justifications for swearing at teachers or contributing to a general sense of lawlessness in the classroom that a newer teacher is insufficiently experienced to deal with.

I’m calling this newsletter “Teaching, Part III” because this is simply the reality that teachers have to deal with today. It is incredibly frustrating and actually somewhat alarming to deal with. There was at least one student last year who I was afraid might hit me to show me who was boss. When teachers feel threatened by their students, it is no wonder that teachers quit after only five years or so in the classroom. Moreover, the lack of support from upper administration on these matters is disheartening. That student that swore at me multiple times for refusing to put his phone away should have been suspended from school for at least a day, if not three to five, and should be every single time that he does so. And yet, he won’t even get a slap on the wrist, because God forbid anybody should make him feel unwelcome in the school—as if teachers who bear the brunt of this disrespect are made to feel welcome by having to deal with this.

Anyway, this has been a rant. I apologize for the delay in sending this out; I have been trying to stick to a 10 A.M. release to add to your leisurely Sunday reading, but I spent all of yesterday planning my lessons for the next week. Please send this newsletter to people you think may appreciate it, and subscribe if you enjoyed reading.

A disclaimer: Due to a deeper consideration of some of the career risks I run in writing this newsletter, I have edited this and other newsletters to remove some identifying information that I included when I wrote it at first. I don’t think it will take away from the value of the newsletter, but you may notice some awkward repetitions of words or phrases (like “the Vice Principal”) to avoid identifying anybody by name. Thank you for your understanding.