It's no surprise that students change over time. The main reason behind this is society. As a society our taste in pop culture and the latest cool invention all contribute to how we live our lives. Just think back to the time you were in school and I can bet you very little is the same. Take a look at the key changes from students in 1997 to 2007 to 2017.
No Self Confidence
“I teach English at a rural high school. The biggest issue for 2017 students is that they have almost zero self confidence. I don’t know if this is a product of culture, or if this is just a fluke with my students. However, they are unwilling to try anything challenging or new without an extreme amount of one on one guidance. And that’s very difficult to give in a classroom of 30.”
Kids Don’t Change, Parents Do
“My dad taught middle school from 1968-2004, when he retired I asked him what changes he saw in students from the beginning of his teaching career to the end. he answered; ‘the kids never changed. a teenager is always a teenager. the parents however, changed dramatically. they used to respect teachers and side with us in disciplinary matters, but now they think their kids are perfect and we are wrong. I’m glad I’m getting out before it gets worse.'”
Terrorism
“’97 – (Little regard to terrorism) ’07 – ‘Remember 9/11?’ ’17 – ‘Can you explain what 9/11 was? I wasn’t born yet.’ As a history teacher it’s been interesting and difficult trying to instill the gravity of events to people who weren’t even born at the time. I imagine it was a similarly strange scenario for teachers who taught during the attack on Pearl Harbor or the assassination of JFK. Strange to have major life events turn to just another historical story for kids within a few short years. At the same time, it gives me motivation to keep teaching with the same passion as if the events just happened so kids continue to understand its importance.”
I NEED A MASTERS
“As a college instructor, teaching all of them right now, taking those years as one year removed from HS graduation. 97: I’m taking school seriously to better myself and my career. 07: I should have not taken all those gap years, c’s get degrees. 17: Oh sh-t if I don’t get at least a Master’s I’m going to be made redundant by a robot.”
Senior Pranks
“Senior Pranks in 1997 were outlandish and acceptable. Senior Pranks in 2007 were less common and more basic. In 2017 Senior Pranks are illegal.”
The Student Teacher Relationship
“Recently had a parent/teacher conference with my daughter’s 7th Grade Science Teacher. For reference here: 20 years ago I was in the 7th grade. I asked why my daughter’s grade was so low in Science. The teacher looks at my daughter with this teasing, friendly manner and is like ‘I don’t know kiddo, why’s it so low?’ She fesses up that she didn’t turn in two of her lab notes. ‘That’s right and you have zeroes, but we talked about it today didn’t we and you’re going to get those in.’ ‘Yeah, you know it girl.’ They giggle and do some weird high five inside joke thing. You’d have thought they were best friends. Two things drastically different from 20 years ago: 1) I would have gotten reamed at that meeting for even wasting a teacher’s time when I know I wasn’t turning in my homework. She would have looked at my mother and been like ‘He’s going to fail, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ These days my child would have to literally skip school for like 2 weeks to fail. 2) Her teacher was smoking hot. All of her teachers are, they are all young and hip and seem really laid back. My teachers were all over 45, hanging on to tenure, and hated everything about their lives.”
Calculator In Pocket
“1997 – ‘You won’t always have a calculator with you everywhere you go in life!’ 2017 – ‘Before beginning the test, every student must disable the multi-function calculator that goes with them everywhere in life.'”
Attitude Change
“All teens rebel. They all think they have it right and the grownups have it wrong… but they show it differently. In 97 the prevailing word was Anger. ‘I HATE the way things are..’ Kids were harsher. Meaner. Being nasty was the way to show you’re cool. I saw a lot of kids get their kicks out of breaking the Santa illusion for grade schoolers for example. 17 kids are much nicer to each other. Think of the music of the time, Smashing Pumpkins, NIN, and the like. ‘In spite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage’ In 07 the word was Mope. Kids were softening up, being nicer to each other, but also getting more into the ‘Sadness is beautiful’ kind of thing. They weren’t angry at the adults so much as they just wanted them to go away and hide into their hoodies. ‘Leave me alone to my solitude.’ Consider the way Emo was huge at this time. In 17 kids are MUCH nicer to each other. They’re kind to young kids and friendlier in general… but there’s this strange undercurrent of competition to be ‘The Most Good Person’ which leads to the weird ‘Yes Mayonnaise is a gender if that’s how you identify’ kind of thing. In ’17 kids want to explain to the grownups how they’re all bigots. They also handle failure FAR worse than previous generations. ’17 kids try harder and genuinely want to succeed in ways that the ’97 kids didn’t. In ’97 you were cool if you avoided working hard and didn’t care if you failed… but ’97 kids also recovered from adversity faster. They didn’t bruise as easily. They were harder, meaner kids, but also didn’t quit as easily and thrived on constructive criticism. Now there’s bits of each of these personality types in every year. There were nice kids who were also soft in 97, and there are mopey emo types now… but the prevailing culture shifted these ways.”
Colorful Hair And Tattoos
“1997: Colorful hair and piercings. 2007: no Colorful hair, lots of tattoos. 2017: Colorful hair and tattoos. (I teach in college) Oh the other difference was 1997: No one talked about being gay, 2007: students came out to me privately in my office, 2017: Students talk about being gay in class.”
No Trust
“My father graduated high school in the mid 60s. After graduation, he and a few friends rented a sailboat and went from the Carolina coast to the Bahamas. Young, free, healthy men spent a few days sailing, a week on the beach, and sailed home. When I graduated, shortly after 9/11, I tried to repeat this trip with a few of my friends. No one would rent their sailboat to a couple 18 year olds. I guess societal trust has changed. We finally find one through a friend of my father and set sail for the Bahamas. 2 days in and we see a helicopter, then a coast Guard vessel, then we’re boarded by us government guys with guns who say ‘alright, boys, what is it today, you moving guns or drugs?’ After searching the boat for hours (and it’s a tiny boat) and finding nothing, we are let go, but instructed to turn around and sail home under threat of arrest if we continued south. Yeah, so I guess things have changed a bit”
Not Taking Risks
“I hear from people mentioning how high schoolers these days aren’t as creative or don’t take risks as often or can’t figure stuff out on their own. I’m a high school senior, and I can only speak from my perspective, but for me, I’m hesitant to take risks because the consequences are so great. Let’s say that I wanted to take a challenging IB class and try to push myself a little harder. If I fail or get a poor grade, that drags down my GPA and can seriously mess up my options for the future. If college admissions see a 3.0 and a 3.2 from applicants from the same background, they’ll probably take the 3.2. So bam. Because you took a risk, you cant get into the college you wanted to. Colleges don’t see that you challenged yourself and took a risk and learned from your failure, they see the failure itself and dismiss you for it. That mindset – one of, ‘you have to be perfect and don’t mess this up OR ELSE’ – is one that I see ALL OVER. So much is expected of me that it’s hard to take risk and deal with failure because not only do you have yourself to beat up over it, but everyone around you also berates you for it. It’s hard to take risks when it seems like your entire self worth and future is at stake. Standard disclaimer – I was not in school before the 2000s. This is my experience as a student and member of the younger generation.”
Watching Netflix
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“’97 – ‘Quit passing notes’ ’07 – ‘Quit texting’ ’17 – ‘Are you seriously watching Netflix right now?'”
Work Ethic
“I was a student in 1997 at the school I now teach at, so I can answer this one. 2017 students are infinitely more polite, harder working and more intelligent than my cohort ever was. They’re much less likely to smoke, they don’t drink cider on the playing field at lunchtime, and they don’t sell each other sh-tty weed in industrial quantities (I gather they sell each other excellent quality weed in very small quantities instead). It’s a big secondary school on a fairly deprived estate, so these aren’t exactly kids who go to etiquette classes after school, but I literally can’t open a door by myself because some 16-year-old with mutton chops will spring out to open it for me. If I’d done that when I was at school, it would have been instant social death.”
Access To Information
“I’m only 24 (born 1992) but I’m in grad school for secondary education currently and I’m student teaching at my old high school. I eat lunch with my old social studies teachers and we’ve discussed the differences between my high school years (07-11) and now. The main difference is the access to smart phones and high speed internet. Kids no longer have to memorize monotonous facts and years because 9/10 times they can just google the information. Now kids can focus on more abstract information or more creative analysis. However more times than not kids just send snapchats and look at Star Wars memes in class.”
No More Pagers
“97: ‘You can have the pager back at the end of the day’ 07: ‘You can have the cell phone back at the end of the day’
17: ‘Ok, everyone go to Google Classrooms on your tablets and pull up today’s links.'”
Diverse Classroom
“Not exactly teacher, but my mother is an educational assistant (works with special needs students in the classroom). As policies changed, more and more mentally disabled students have been integrated into classrooms at the same time that funding has been cut from the EA program. It is also common to have extremely poor behaviour children misdiagnosed as autistic, when it is more of an issue on the parent’s end. An example would be a situation where the transient Dad was into MMA, and bonded with the child through rough housing. The six year old then ruled over mom in the house because mom couldn’t control the kid – no bedtime, eat what they wanted or risk a violent tantrum. This child was initially misdiagnosed with autism, which the parents hid behind that diagnosis as a justification for poor enforcement of behaviour. They also resisted the school’s recommendations for the child to be sent to the special behavioural program at a different school for a very long time (at no additional cost, paid transport for the student via taxi, etc). She has diaper trained students in kindergarten before. When my mom started her job, she actually taught these students basic skills (obviously student dependent, based on their issue and level of cognition). Now her job is almost entirely behaviour management. It’s gone from “how can I teach this child” to “what schedule and methods can we use to prevent a meltdown?”. She generally gets kicked, sworn at, and bruised every day from elementary aged special needs students who are suffering from lack of support in schools and at home. She’s not a very strong lady, and is at major risk of injury from using holds to restrain these students when they are at risk of hurting themselves or other students. The other faculty seem to have adopted the ministry’s stance that the EAs are nonessential. She’s worked at schools where they were not permitted at staff meetings. Edit: to clarify this is more the principal who adopted this stance. The teachers are extremely supportive and work with my mother and defend EAs. Parents now turn against them, because all they hear from their behavioural child is that Mrs. _is mean. Edit: example would be if she stops the student from eating the entire contents of their lunch bag at morning recess because the student has food hoarding issues (before you mention it, children’s aid was involved with this case). But the student goes home and tells mom that mrs. _* wouldn’t let them eat and mom gets mad. She’s trying to tough it out until retirement in 6 years but she hates her job every day. It’s not the same one she signed up for.”
The Demographic Of Classes
“I wasn’t old enough to teach yet in 1997. I was 4 years out of high school, young and naive. In 2007, students were semi-glued to their phones, but the technology to integrate them into the classroom (Twitter accounts, Facebook, Snapchat, etc) wasn’t there, not was it encouraged in any way through administration. There was still a ‘phones away’ rule…for the most part. The students in my tech courses at the college I was working were older. Either getting re-certified, new degrees, or simply enhancing their current skills with newer ones. I would put most of the ages in the late 20’s to mid-30’s. In 2017, I have young students right out of high school. It’s rare now that I have an older student. Most of these students come in with at least basic knowledge of technology/hardware/software, but more often than not they are even more advanced than that. It’s interesting how the tech group got so much younger and more skilled, while the older group…I don’t know. Do they not move forward anymore? Are they switching to different careers?”
Social media Is Rampant
“Graduated HS in 1995. Taught middle/high school in 2007 and am teaching college in 2017. I’d argue the biggest difference is technology. In the nineties, pagers were all the rage and the internet was relatively new to the masses and something you did sitting down at a computer (and excruciatingly slow). So as a teenager we spent a lot of time hanging out with each other one on one with an absence of technology. Sometimes we’d father to play video games, but multiplayer was limited to a local network or split screen. Most commonly we’d just take turns. But I’d argue, technology was not something we spent a lot of time on, but rather dabbled with. 2007 was at the beginning of the smartphone revolution. Many (maybe most) students at this point have cell phones. Social media, youtube were coming of age. And that has changed students a lot, in my opinion. I used to get annoyed/borderline angry when I saw a group of people at dinner all on their phones. Social media is rampant. A lot of studies have correlated increasing usage of social media with social disconnectedness and even depression. It is as if the creation of virtual social circles has actually created less personal social cohesion. So it’s important to put your phone down and go just hang out more, rather than less. You’ll hear, back in my day kids (fill in the blank). And it’s for the most part horse shit. Kids are kids. Teens are teens. Some are put together. Some have huge obstacles to overcome. Progress that has been made. It seems to me that young people are much more tolerant of other people’s sexual orientation, culture and religion compared when I was a kid. I don’t know anyone from my 700+ high school that was out of the closet or identified as anything other than Christian publicly. I never thought I would see gay marriage happen, or pot legalized for that matter. And now the focus on transgender issues is at society’s forefront. These are great steps that can not be over looked and discounted. So back in my day, kids played outside and with each other teaching kids them healthy social relationships. But people that weren’t the ‘norm’ were silenced. These rascals today spend too much god damn time on their phones but live in a more accepting society. Oh yeah, and have dank memes.”
Phone Size
“No phones. Small phones. Big phones.”
Parental Involvement
“Graduated HS in 93. Taught middle school. I noticed a definite change regarding phones/social media. Went through the whole adjustment of no one having a phone to trying to enforce rules about phones to just dealing with them. (From a teachers perspective, I’d like to smash the sh-t out of their phones when they’re using them in class. Kids think they are sneaky, some are really not.) anyway, went from kids being d–ks about phones to now being cool and better about being polite about it. Definitely more parental involvement now as opposed to 10 yrs ago. I feel students today want to be told exactly what to do and won’t risk trying to figure it out on their own. (My husband just hired two assistants who are 22 & 23 in his job– he says they are constantly needing guidance for stuff they should be able to figure out on their own. It’s just interesting that he is seeing it as well and has nothing to do with education.) students today are more aware of Social issues. Most Kids in 1997 weren’t thinking about equality and immigration or anything political. Now kids are much more informed And mostly more tolerant. Kids today do not seem to care about being outside as much. Probably bc the media overdose has everyone convinced there’s a pervert or murderer behind ever bush. I find myself spending ridiculous amounts of time on my phone looking socail media, and other digital entertainment. It is strange to realize how it feels like a waste of time. In 1997 this was not a problem. So, it is not just changing students, it is a change in all of us. Teaching has certainly become a lot cooler as far as the technology goes. Not so much with the administrative interference.”
Personal Experiences Part 1
“I’m on the young side, but currently work as a high school educator. My family has also been running the same experiential education business for about 3 generations, so most of my answer will draw from that. We have anecdotal observations running from the ’50s to now, and a few journals/texts from others who did similar work using basically the same model all the way back to the 1920s. Bear in mind these are nontraditional education environments – but they are consistent across decades. We worked with school groups and individual kids in wilderness and camp settings, but it’s fair to say that these settings were consistently educational. All of our programs have been built around the notion of given young people power, agency, and choice very explicitly – our programs exist for them to explore community and society building on their own, with mentorship from adults but little direct interference. So I can’t speak so much to how students perform on busy work and homework over time, but can certainly speak to values and abilities in the broader sense. Also, one important conversation that has been missed – childhood for priveleged kids largely on the ‘college track’ and filled with activities these days is VERY different from childhood for poorer kids where that might not be the expectation, and schedules tend to be a lot less full. I’ve worked with kids coming from both types of school system and tracks, and the experiences are different. A lot of what I’ve seen matches what I am seeing people right here, including: ’17 kids are professional, polite, and generally better behaved than their counterparts in the past (therefore?) ’17 kids are more responsive to authority, but also afraid of it/reliant on it. ’17 kids are definitely more tech saavy, no surprises there. Ironically, these kids are harder to influence – their sources of knowledge and inspiration go beyond you. So despite being more responsive to authority, they are less responsive to traditional tools for convincing people to change their minds (i.e. discussion, reverse psychology never works when my grandpa and folks older than him said it was a reliable tool, etc…) – odds are good they’ve been exposed to your information already. When I give kids from ’17 free time, without access to technology, they literally can’t figure out what to do That last point is most striking for me, but you can see it everywhere – boredom has largely been rooted out of existence. There is always something to do. We used to see a lot more self-organizing activity among young people (getting together to play live music, making up a game, etc…) and now we find ourselves having to intervene more often to keep kids from just sitting. They struggle to develop their own initiatives and activities. But I think this whole thing is premised on the wrong question. We need to ask whats the difference between 1997, 2007, and 2017 PARENTS? All of these traits of kids are natural consequences of the way they are raised: They are bad at making plans because they never have to make them – days are filled with activities their parents put on their plates. Kids may self-select, but often because of college pressure from parents. They are responsive to authoritarianism because they really haven’t experienced freedom (due to the above, and because there are so many rules now – and so much more surveillance), both in school and at home. They stay in contact with their parents BECAUSE THEIR PARENTS MAKE THEM DO IT. I shifted to wilderness programs in part because this makes technology moot – service doesn’t reach the places I go. But parents FLIP at this. In camps, where phones are forbidden, kids generally are much more willing to do this than parents are. Parents want that daily check-in. Kids sometimes do, but less often. But there are plenty of reasons for this. Back in the day, my grandfather would have kids out in the woods building their own huts. They literally built much of the camp they operated on. The kids were expected to come in and help cook in the kitchen. A few hours before lunch, when people were hungry, kids would need to come help make meals or meals wouldn’t happen. So kids figured out norms of self-governance to ensure that people would go help in the kitchens. Sometimes it was people who wanted to cook doing it all the time. Sometimes there was a schedule so everybody cooked. We didn’t care, but it had to happen.”
Personal Experiences Part 2
“I couldn’t really do this today without a lot of legal risk I’m not willing to take on as a small business. So I’ve shifted to smaller wilderness based programs where we have a bit more flexibility (less of an expectation of consistent meal times, for example). Kids have to cook for themselves in small groups. I’ve devised something I call the “rule of 3 days” – I won’t run a trip using our typical non-interfering strategy for less than 3 days, because it takes that long for kids to get into the swing of things, cooking for themselves, making plans, etc… The first 3 days are brutal, because the kids are taking a lot of time to come around to the fact that my staff are absolutely refusing to make plans or decisions for them. They have to do it. In many cases (and these kids are 14, 15, 16) it’s really the first time they’ve ever been GIVEN responsibility, and it’s the first time they’re making a serious decision that could impact their lives 24/7 over several days. I do want to emphasize that the kids do come around to this, eventually. It’s taking longer than in the past, but they are ultimately no less capable – but I have the advantage of an environment where I can remove the technology and all adults present are agreeing to not intervene short of major safety issues (we actually have 4 ‘thresholds’ where we’ll intervene). I work in a high school currently, and without those factors it’s hard to get the same results. I try not to blame the kids. I try to think about the world these kids are growing up in, even without factoring in the parents: Less abandoned land – even in suburbs, the tracts of land kids could once trespass on with little consequence are vastly diminished. A more litigious society means there is a greater risk to kids running free on your property, so that means more fences and more regulated spaces, over less spaces in general. My dad grew up exploring woods in rural areas in what is now a national park – the parkland has more regulations, obviously, but most of the other places he grew up playing and exploring are now more heavily monitored because there are more private landowners, and less accessible. This is true all over the region (and we’re in a woodsy part of the world! With more people in cities, it’s even crazier!) More litigious society. I run the same essential business as my grandparents, but I have to follow significantly more regulations to make it happen, and that limits my operating abilities. The crazy stuff they used to do (kids building buildings, traveling without a guide, etc…) could easily be read as negligent now. Insurance wouldn’t cover me. Parents wouldn’t trust me. I simply can’t give kids the same experience and continue as a responsible operator. Remember this – what is one regulation your lawmakers will ALWAYS be willing to pass? One that ‘protects the children’. More monitoring. Cameras. Baby monitors. Text message updates. We’re just used to hearing from each other more often, so kids are raised with the understanding that your parents know where you are and will be able to reach you. That’s normal to them. This is just a product of technology, not any intentional choice. When I went biking through the city as a kid, there was no way to reach my family – they weren’t just going to keep me at home. Now that there is a way, there is an expectation that should happen (and you could be seen as negligent if you don’t match that expectation!). A lot of people say that these kids get to college and act like kids, and that’s the problem. I think the real problem is the kids get to college, and people expect them to act like kids, build structures and rules around them as though they were, and the kids follow suit. If I’ve learned one thing in this work, it’s that your expectation for what the capabilities of young people are almost universally puts the defining limit on what their capabilities actually are. People generally don’t rise to the occasion. They generally fall to the level of their training. So if you build a system where young people see a lot of structure, rules, and guidelines that match their historic expectations (i.e. a college system that largely governs them as though they were still minors), you should expect them to continue along that historic trend. If high schools have as much structure as middle schools, and colleges as much structure as high school, and entry level jobs have as much structure as colleges, you won’t see a change. We NEED more people and programs out there disrupting these patterns if we want kids to be functioning individuals capable of developing their own structures, governing their own lives, and making decisions. These are really important skills, and they aren’t replaced by tech saavy, strong work ethic, or the other (very real) “pros” of the current generation.”
Adulting
“Graduated high school and went to college in the late 90s, started teaching at the college level in mid-2000s, still teaching at the college level. I would say that in general I didn’t notice much of a difference between when I went to college and when I started teaching at college. I went to a state school, I now teach at a (different) state school. Students generally got done what they needed to get done, partied, enjoyed chatting and having fun in the classroom, and more or less seemed to live their lives fairly similarly to how I did. The last few years have been different, and I’m not entirely sure why, and it is specifically the last few years when the shift occurred. I’ve spoken with numerous other teachers about this, and everyone I talk to about it that’s been teaching for a while seems to have noticed. As people have noted, students now are more diligent. They work really hard, they’re polite, quiet, but are woefully unprepared for adulthood. Yet, they’re almost to the last all fairly ‘corporate’ and ‘professionalized’. They act like they are all intending to become middle managers. The idea of college education as anything other than (incredibly expensive) job training is lost on them — likely due to that ‘incredibly expensive’ part. They diligently do busy work, but when asked to do creative, novel, or independent work/analysis, it’s like that screen Chrome browser gives you when it crashes. They’re also less anti-authoritarian than I’ve seen in the past. This is helpful for classroom management, but I worry about a society of people who unquestioningly do busywork, can’t think independently, and blindly listen to authority. If you think it’s just me, all teachers teaching incoming freshman last year had to attend a lecture series given by a couple of the deans regarding the demographics and habits of our incoming freshman. Basically, the takeaway was this: We should not expect students to be able to pay attention in class. We should not expect students to be able to socialize easily with their classmates. We should not expect students to be able to understand and/or figure out a syllabus. We should not expect students to be able to manage their own personal affairs outside of the classroom. We should not expect them to be able to self-task in terms of research/self-education. We should expect more phone calls from parents, more parental intervention, and a heavy reliance on parents by our students who, we were informed, are likely texting their parents during and/or immediately after classes if they get grades they feel are unfair. Most of the ‘we should not expect students to be able to do X’ comes from research that the deans cited (I don’t remember if it was from our university or published in a journal or what) that shows that most of those issues stem from that extreme reliance on other people, typically parents for younger students, through all of their K-12 education. AKA, their parents did so much for them down to explaining class expectations and how a course works (syllabuses), that now that they’re expected to do it on their own, they can’t because they’ve never really done it. I think the deans maybe were a bit hyperbolic, but most of that does seem to be true for a lot of students now, and I will say this: until three years ago, I had NEVER received a phone call or email from a parent regarding their children’s grades and/or academic performance. Since 2014, I have received numerous phone calls and probably a half dozen emails. You want to see a helicopter parent lose their sh-t? Explain to them that their children are legally adults and due to FERPA guidelines, I can’t discuss their grades or academic performance with them. So, I don’t fault my students necessarily, and I don’t know if this is a long-term trend or not, but I definitely have noticed a pretty significant change in my students over the last few years. I also get the sense that they may know that there is something different about them vs. previous generations of college students, as I find them expressing concern about themselves and their classmates. They say things about people struggling to look each other in the eye, or make small talk, etc. So, anyway basically students are politer and more diligent but have become worse at adulting and being independent.”