I’m dealing with some weird situations with students lately.
One motif I see emerging, though, is that there’s a new (meaning in the last couple of years) is a lack of personal responsibility among students. I think I see where it’s coming from, but it has taken on a turbo-level growth since the election of Donald Trump.
I think the center point of this problem is a confluence of three things:
- We’re starting to see adults from a generation who use text messages more than they use voice communication (I mean face-to-face and over phones). They’re used to being in their own head
- We’re also starting to see adults from the generation where stuff like 4Chan wasn’t actually subversive anymore but was seen as a subversive community. These kids have a sort of re-birth of the bully-as-cool motif. The generation before me (the bleeding front edge of Gen X) had this belief that emulating bullies was cool. Being cruel, being sarcastic, being “whatever, like I effing care,” about everything. Then came my generation, and we sort of inverted that, thinking of the world as it was before being cruel was cool (this cycle repeats if you trace it back– my mother’s generation was the ‘be good to each other’ one, the one before it was the cruel one, etc.).
Here’s the problem, though: the older Gen Xers did the mean thing IRONICALLY. It was meant to be sort of a “see, we can steal your language and use it against you.” I even do a small-scale version of this myself. I’ve been told by people before that I need to say “no” more often, so I took to– with people who know me well enough to know it’s a joke– saying “no” as I do favors or hand someone something or whatever. It’s meant to be funny, a rib at the idea of me needing to say no. Like “okay, I’ll say it, but I won’t mean it.”
The new generation, best I can tell, likes to talk the hard game to each other, but they are also the emotional softies that me and my peers were, meaning that they get hurt by the things that they say when someone else employs the same tactic. It leads to messes like someone being sarcastic with a friend and saying “at least I didn’t write this piece of shit, right?” when pointing at the friend’s work, hurting the friend’s feelings, and causing trouble. - The last issue I see with the current generation of college students will seem damning, so I want to say that first-of-all I’m basing this in part on my research of gamers and also I am not speaking in absolutes. I’m not saying they’re all like this. But there’s a magic mix you get if you add really talented people to an environment where you can live in your own head and be the superstar of your own hero’s journey: you become the hype you create for yourself. This can be healthy. This can proper people to do great things. But the down side is that it makes it incredibly hard to accept criticism.
My generation suffered from the same trouble taking criticism but in a different way. We didn’t think we were better than anyone: we thought everyone was basically worthless. We saw what the government was doing to anyone who wasn’t rich, we saw what schools did to anyone who wasn’t “cool,” and those among us who went into academic fields to keep thinking saw how the academy and industry and even entertainment basically consumed our generation like it was a tasty snack. So we had trouble accepting harshly worded, definitive criticism because it was coming from someone who we felt like was just as lost and confused as we were, so there needed to be less bass in the voices.
I know how to handle people who think that, since I am one. I know that I take constructive criticism well as long as a person isn’t belittling me while offering it. Also– it helps if the person isn’t actually wrong about something in the process, as ethos is what defines my amount of respect for someone’s commentary. If I think someone knows better, I listen.
But the new generation’s combo is proving– in the most extreme cases, so just at the edges, but close enough to the norm that I see it at least once or twice a semester– almost untenable. If you are: 1. The star of your world, 2. Always sarcastic and 3. Overly likely to “tilt” when someone is sarcastic with you even though being sarcastic is, as I just pointed out, your default, it can be difficult to negotiate situations where you need to learn from criticism.
At this point, I’m still formulating ways to make it work. To this point in my career, I have gotten by as a teacher by using my own ethos, by solving interpersonal problems with students by being genuine and appealing to their good nature.
It’s harder for me to figure out how to handle it when everyone’s being sarcastic and backbiting.
Today, for the first time in a long time, I used the Eric Cartman “you will respect my authority” card. I feel like maybe I need to, because maybe that’s how this generation sees me. I’m “the man,” the “person in the background who makes things happen.” Maybe my attempts to put them on equal footing with me are what causes the situations to be difficult to tend.
Or maybe I just need to be super sarcastic and insulting with them.
Honestly, I don’t know, but I feel bad for them. And feel bad for all of us trying to communicate with them. I am sure it reads as judge-y how I explained their mentality, but I don’t blame them. That’s their world. Just like my world was full of slackers and college radio and pre-dangerous hackers and Usenet nerds and comic shops. Their world is full of memes and text messages and put-downs that are meant to be endearing.
My generation’s glitch was looking like we didn’t care when we actually cared too much.
This generation’s glitch appears to be talking tough but being sensitive.
Maybe, in the end, it’s closer to the same problem than I think. It’s just wearing different pants.