On Teaching Gen Z and Gen AI

Despite challenges, the future of today's kids still lies in the classroom. And now, so does mine.

When I left college and entered the workforce in the late 2000s, I was lucky enough to get a pretty laidback office job as an assistant magazine editor. This was during the height of the Great Recession, when jobs of any kind were hard to come by, so they paid me and my fellow 20-somethings next to nothing and constantly told us how lucky we were to have jobs at all. Anyway, the job had its perks and one of them was plenty of downtime to browse what we might think of now as Millennial Media—Buzzfeed, Vice, Mic, and my personal favorite, Gawker. All of these sites were fresh and funny and spoke to us because they bristled openly at the reductive media narrative that Millennials were lazy, entitled, self-absorbed, social media obsessed, overeducated, and “killing” off various industries by spending too much on avocado toast.

Needless to say, it’s a framing I’ve never quite accepted because while the narrative possessed some minimal truth, I suppose, it scoffed at all the root causes for our apparent sense of dissatisfaction. Namely, that we were being shut out of the grand bargain of the American dream we were promised by our parents’ generation: Go to college, get a job, buy a house, have a family. Instead, we got bank bailouts and a foreclosure crisis; spiraling inflation and a bum job market. Nobody listened to us, yet everything was our fault.

All that’s to say, I typically take any piece purporting to generalize an entire generation with a grain of salt. But when I read one recently, about a younger generation, it did admittedly give me something to chew over in terms of how today’s kids think, learn and experience their world. I’m not a doomer, but I am a little worried.

First, some context. A few months ago, I decided to go back to school to get my teaching credential, with the goal of becoming a high school English teacher. For any generation, the future always lies in the classroom, and for that reason, if nothing else, I’m happy mine does too.

As part of the credentialing process, I’m taking a slate of education courses, including one on the thoughtful use of edtech, which has been a highlight of the semester. The other day, memories of my Millennial heyday came rushing back to me when I read a 2019 article from the California Teacher Association (CTA) on the challenges of teaching Gen Z as part of a homework assignment for that class.

Now I realize Gen Z is aging out of the classroom, replaced by Gen AI or whatever. But outdated as the piece may seem—was there even a world before COVID-19?—it still left a queasy feeling in my stomach, as I read about the anxiety, isolation, depression, and discontent today’s youth are staring down. To the extent that things have changed, it’s not for the better. A recent Common Sense Media survey found today’s kids spend more of their screen time gaming and watching short-form video of the TikTok variety, and less timing watching TV shows and reading books. Attention spans are shrinking, along with memory retention. Meanwhile, social media algorithms have gotten even more insidious, addictive, and radicalizing.

But what if I were Gen Z? Would I take the same umbrage with a piece like this that I did all those years ago with Why Millennials are killing paper napkins? (This must be my generational self-absorption at work). The truth is, I probably would. So I reread the CTA piece and tried to pinpoint exactly what gave me that queasy feeling; and it wasn’t just the time on screens.

Certainly the sixth grader who equated playing video games with friends as “technically hanging out” made me sad, though I doubt he’d see it that way. But he might more readily take the point about phones becoming a tragic feedback loop, trapping kids between validation, constant surveillance, unregulated dopamine highs, and social ostracization if they dare to opt out.

More to the point for teachers and future teachers, Gen Z is sketched out as cautious-to-a-fault in their decisionmaking. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls this their “moral dependency,” the idea that today’s kids have offloaded considerable amounts of their cognitive abilities to nearby adults and now technology platforms like AI that are all too eager to fix their problems before they’ve given them enough thought. Without a sense of productive struggle, we’re only feeding their anxiety, their sense of helplessness.

In a brilliant piece for Edutopia about advice teachers should ignore, educator Jay Wamsted tells us to resist treating students as too fragile. The classroom, he writes, is not a warm bath you need to ease into. There is structure, accountability, boundaries, expectations, and consequences—and these are all good things. A few weeks ago I read a social media post that really stuck with me. It noted that kids today don’t have the same respect for authority as those in earlier generations, because of cellphones. By sticking kids in front of screens, parents can get quiet in the house without discipline, which is having a drastic impact on classroom behavior.

I’m still thinking about how much technology I’ll permit in my classroom, and what types. I believe kids need to experience a sense of struggle and difficulty in order to learn, and shortcuts like AI defeat the purpose, even when appropriately scaffolded. I expect my class will be hard; students will have to work at their zone of proximal development and beyond without much help. “But Mr. Noonoo,” they will say. “What happens when we leave your class and have to use AI at our jobs and you don’t prepare us for that?”

To that, allow me to point out that two weeks after ChatGPT debuted, education influencers were already selling how-to guides on using it in the classroom. They were publishing e-books within a month. Is that because they possessed some magic algorithmic knowledge of prompt engineering or deep LLM expertise of the kind Meta et al. are now paying specialists 200 million a year for? No, of course not! They were leaning on their decades of hard-earned critical thinking skills and applying it to this new technology. We will never again live in a world with tech that isn’t user friendly and easy to learn (even if it’s hard to master). If teachers impart these skills, they should be able to pick up new tech in a weekend.

The fact is, I didn’t learn to write by copy/pasting or rushing off to the AI homework machine every time I had a deadline. I learned by banging my head against my keyboard over and over, straining for the next sentence, working and reworking my transitions, and by reading books and articles by much better journalists than me. If I had a dollar for every time I said “I have no idea what I’m trying to say ” halfway through a first draft—well, I wouldn’t be picking up teaching right now, that’s for sure. In fact, I’m doing it at this very moment. I don’t really know how to end this post, having spent so much time above talking about generational narratives.

I guess what I’d say is that I know firsthand that these sorts of stories don’t get everything right. Generalizations miss too many individuals, and they don’t always tell us why people experience the world the way they do. And like I said, I’m not a doomer. If I’ve learned anything so far, it’s that the job of teachers isn’t to accept these technological, cultural or generational obstacles to learning as fait accompli, but to find ways to reach students anyway, and to prepare them for an increasingly difficult life after high school—one where too often the land grab for their attention is given far more weight than their critical thinking abilities.

Here, complacency is dangerous. Because I want the same sense of productive struggle for my students that served me so well in my journalism career. I want them to work their way out of their apathy and anxiety the way literate humans have for thousands of years. That takes work. You won’t find any shortcuts to that on your phone. And a year from now, you won’t find any in my classroom either.