It is so so SO much easier to teach today than 10-15 years ago. Zoomers are on another level from Millennials.
Sorry, Millennials, I don’t think you all suck. Not at all. But cumulatively, it was… not easy.
While Millennials were woke, Zoomers are awake.
Say more? 😊
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Millennials wanted to guess “the right answer” and reproduce it verbatim. Other than that, it was impossible to get them to say anything. There were several years where such a thing as a class discussion simply didn’t exist.
Zoomers talk, they have opinions, they don’t sit there, looking terrified.
That’s interesting! I wonder why that is.
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I noticed that zoomers were brighter before COVID ever hit. I think there’s more to it.
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“I wonder why that is”
There’s an idea that American generations tend to alternate between coddled/sheltered and left to their own devices (neglect, benign and otherwise).
greatest – coddled
silents – neglected
boomers – coddled
generation x – neglected (off the charts)
millenials – sheltered (off the charts)
zoomers – neglected
I’m from late boomer/early x sub-generation that probably had the best of both worlds.
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My gen probably neglected (X/Y). Confused about my grandparents’ generation being coddled though. They all went to work to support the family before they were adults. It was the Depression.
Were boomers coddled? I mean, they grew up materially better off, their parents wanted to give them all the things they didn’t have, etc. But at the same time… my dad and his brothers apparently spent their childhoods blowing stuff up in the woods without their parents’ knowledge.
I get the feeling that 50s coddled is different from 90s coddled. More dangerous toys, fewer supervised afterschool activities.
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“50s coddled is different from 90s coddled”
Oh, definitely. 50’s coddled (maybe I should have said… nurtured) was about material comfort but without constant oversight.
90’s coddled was trying to complete control every aspect of the child’s life.In the 90s I heard of parents going into job interviews with their kids…
My mom hassled me for a while about getting a job after high school when I didn’t have anything like a plan… but stopped once I started taking CC courses which didn’t last long but then I sort of had a job and then the parents let me find my own path (which was not fast by any means).
“N also spent his pre-teen years in the woods”
I’m sure there are generational differences among those who grew up in the USSR, but I really doubt if they correspond very closely with US generations.
I really wish someone with detailed knowledge of the soviet union would examine that….
If had to venture a guess I’d say that both you and N are what I might call Generation Misha (named after the olympic mascot) well after the peak of soviet prosperity (around 1969? ended by the invasion of Czechoslovakia andbworsened by Afghanistan) and only partly sheltered from the truth of soviet rot vis a vis the west.
Kind of a guess.
It definitely doesn’t work generationally like in the US. We didn’t have Baby Boomers for the obvious reason. We had the opposite.
I love Generation Misha and will now try to popularize it. That Olympic bear balloon flying away is one of my first memories.
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methylethyl
Much of it depends upon class and local, the “silents” are the most ridiculously misnamed group. Many became the pampered leaders of the 60’s and 70’s, loud empty-minded complainers, the Beats, the Yippees, and the Libbers. Kind of wonder if that lack of direction and discipline were because so many men were overseas ;-D
In my experience, it is true that millennials were too concerned to say the right answer to be able to generate a debate in class, with some exceptions. I am not ready to be as generous as you are with the Z generation yet. In Canada, they still say platitudes like “multiculturalism is good.” Somehow related: how would you compare second-language competency between both generations? Where I work, in comparison with millennials, knowledge of French among Zs is a bit less advanced, and knowledge of Spanish is abysmal.
Ol.
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In short, we no longer have intermediate courses because students who used to come with enough knowledge of the language to be placed into an intermediate section disappeared.
This is in part COVID and in part the terrible shortage of foreign language teachers in the state. Seven years ago, we were forced to increase the number and credits in the teacher education program so that it would add two additional years of college to the degree.
Why would students want to add two whole years of college, pay for two more years to take courses like, and I kid you not, “Teaching a gifted child”? And all this to become a school teacher. Our teacher education enrollments collapsed. So now there are no teachers.
It’s so dumb.
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“In Canada, they still say platitudes like “multiculturalism is good.”
Exactly who is this “they” that you speak of…Tranna the Good and Vancouver, the land of fruits and nuts ;-D
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Zoomers growing up in Tranna and the GTA.
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GTA is GenX. Or is it something else?
What Tranna is, I don’t know. Which should be exactly right because I’m definitely not a Zoomer.
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“What Tranna is, I don’t know”
A 1980 song by an obscure group called the Kings had the lyrics…
“You said to ring you up when I was in T’rana”
For years I heard that as Tirana (capital of Albania a country which most in NAmerican had probably never heard of at the time).
Was kind of disappointed to find out it was just the local pronunciation of Toronto.
In the song the T and R are separated and not affricated (pronounced like chr as in chree (tree). Is that still the case or is it noun pronounced Chranna?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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