Kids These Days

I’m a school teacher and I’ve been having a hard time this year with some of my students. I think I’m experiencing the first generation of kids who’ve always known smart phones, and always had constant entertainment at their fingertips. School just can’t cut it in comparison.

I’ve been trying to engage them, but it’s not much fun fighting with them to get them interested. For example, I can’t play games in English class to practice vocabulary or grammar, because they cheat. I can’t leave them to work on their own; they try to finish whatever task I give them as quickly as possible in order to get back on their phones. I take away the phones, I change their seating arrangements, I cajole, I harangue, but it’s just not fun this year. They are a generation that has constant, positive feedback from algorithms that cater to their every whim, except they’re kids so who knows what they might like in future. They’ll likely never get the chance to find out.

I have a hard time with kids that don’t seem to be interested in anything. I ask, and they’re not even, like, gamers, or out playing football. They are consumers. We’ve created a generation of kids who appear to believe that their unique purpose in life is to go shopping. They learned that lesson pretty well, but it just seems pretty empty and useless.

Hopefully it will get better? I have to think of the nice kids, the one who went running after a woman to give her back some spare change that had fallen on the floor, or the kid who’s dream in life (because I asked) is to be a good father. And I can manage some compassion. They are never free of the outside world with their phones on all the time; there’s no off time when they can just be kids.

I’m trying to put some positive vibes out in the world in the world with this blog. Life’s no bed of roses for these kids (or for me at the moment) but for Foro it is. So I choose to think of Foro and a beautiful sunset, and flowers as far as the eye can see.