The Gen Alpha Situation Doesn't Surprise Me as a Former Teacher

hey so something really funny has happened recently the awfulness that is Generation Alpha is a trending topic right now or who knows by the time I get done filming and editing this video but there are countless of videos on Tik Tok and YouTube just recounting the horrors that are gen Alpha there are a lot of comments being made such as gen Alpha doesn't know how to read they don't know how to write they're falling behind they're way below grade level they don't know how to behave in classrooms they don't know how to follow instructions etc etc etc and on top of that the internet is also blaming Millennial parents for not parenting their gen alpha kids there are a lot of conversations going on right now about why that is is it because of the pandemic is because of gen Alpha's overdependence on technology and iPads and iPhones how could we have let this happen as a society well guys as a former teacher I actually kind of saw this coming to be honest and I'd like to tell you today my take on how we got here now before I get into how exactly we got here here I think you should know a little bit of background about me I was in the field of education for 6 years I've worked in an after school program I've worked in a private school and I have also worked in a charter school and they all varied in demographics and backgrounds so I think I can confidently say that I have taught a wide range of students and like I said before there are a lot of complaints right now about how gen Alpha does not know how to behave in class rooms and how they're really behind but I kind of saw all that even before the Pand mic when I was teaching I experienced the same thing with Gen Z students or the tail end of gen Z well the ones that I taught anyway I think we were already on a steady decline in terms of grades and behavior and being able to focus in class and I think that the added stress of the pandemic kind of just exacerbated all of our pre-existing problems when you look at why I quit teaching videos on YouTube there are a lot of Veteran teachers commenting on those videos saying that they have already already been witnessing a steady decline of classroom Behavior over a span of 10 plus years but why is that what caused this if not Co well let me tell you about my personal experience with teaching and why I left the profession in the first place I had left my teaching job at the end of 2022 and for a multitude of reasons now shockingly pay was not one of them Californian teachers actually get paid uh pretty decently in comparison to other states but there were some reasons why I quit that coincide with a lot of other teachers reasons for leaving some of those reasons include students bad behavior students lack of motivation parents unwilling to work with teachers to correct their students behavior and the job overall affecting my mental and physical health yeah let me talk about that last one real quick though man the stress of the job was so much that I regularly had anxiety attacks there were some days during my teaching profession where I would just be crying like during one of my off periods and I would think that I could get it together within that off period but I just couldn't and I'd have to get a sub to cover for me for the day because it was just that bad because I get so anxious about how the kids were going to tear into me that day like legit you have to be really emotionally strong to handle teaching and there are just you know everyone has good days and bad days just like any other person I have my own life and I have other things going on there were some days where I would already be in a terrible head space and children verbally attacking you does not help my partner who'd watched me come home every day from work told me that I looked like I was going to un alive myself at any moment he saw it on my face every time I came home it was horrible and not to mention too I was so stressed that I was stressed eating I was stressed drinking I think when I was teaching I gained about 20 to 30 lbs and you know after being a year away from the profession I've lost some of that weight but not all of it but yeah overall the job was just not physically nor emotionally healthy for me and see that was just one half of it the other half of it came from the colleagues I worked with listen I believe that most everyone who enters the field of teaching has great intentions and comes into it wanting to help children that's great however I had to deal with quite a number of colleagues who in my opinion contributed to that student misbehavior and I have several examples I had this one colleague who in their class all they would do was play movies like day in day out they would just play movies for the kids and they swore that it was like you know a movie that pertained to whatever lesson they were teaching because I think they were they were teaching some sort of like life skills class something like that but yeah they would play movies day in day out the kids love that teacher obviously because they knew that they wouldn't really have to do anything that day for when they had that teacher's class and admin knew about what the teacher was doing as well but they didn't really do anything they were just like oh yeah we hear that the kids love you great job great job they're just they're playing movies for the kids every day how's that contributing to their education is there really much you can learn from Fast and Furious besides family family family family then there was this other cooworker of mine who tried to motivate kids by promising like a fun non-school related activity for them if they did their work which like you know okay sure that could be a thing that could be a motivator especially with kids who like are already not very motivated by school but here's the thing though that teacher would always give in the kids and do the fun activity first like the kids would beg them and beg them and be like we promise that we're going to do our work afterwards but let's do the fun activity first please and the teacher would always fall for it and they do the fun activity and lo and behold the kids do not complete their work afterwards you lost your leverage my man yeah they're not of course they're not going to are we forgetting that kids are kids are we surprised and that's another common thing I noticed amongst my co-workers at the time they seem to have forgotten how kids work like of course a student is going to try to not do school if you let them of course they're going to try to be your friend if that means that you give them like the easy way out man and listen I'm not saying that you can't be chill with your students I think it's totally fine to Grant exceptions and extensions here or there if a student has a good excuse but but I think that there is a huge difference between treating your students like people and being respectful of them and then just straight up having a savior complex because oh my god did so many of my colleagues have some sort ofing savior complex there were so many who thought that they were like the child Whisperer and only they truly understood the kids when in reality all that was really happening was that they were like Crossing some boundaries and kind of being creepily too close to the kids but don't get me wrong not in a creepy gross disgusting sexual way but more so in a that's not quite that professional way more in a like you shouldn't have your kids phone number way more in like a you shouldn't add your kids on your switch way I don't care if you are texting them about homework reminders I just don't think you should be texting them and same thing with social media I know some teachers have like teacher social medias and stuff but I personally am not a fan of that either I think kids should have their own space if social media is their space let them have their space dude I don't care if you get better results you know sending your kid an Instagram message about their homework that is also a little invasive and weird and I I think it could just lead to more harm than good to be honest again it's nice to know your students and treat them like human beings but again let's not treat them like our actual friends because at the end of the day there should be a professional boundary between teachers and students when I was a teacher and I wasn't having to deal deal with misbehavior all the time I did like my job I love teaching there is nothing cooler than teaching science and watching kids faces light up when they have like a super cool experiment and like watching them grow I think all that is awesome but when my colleagues lowered their expectations for our students the students also wanted me to have those Lowered Expectations and I was met with a lot of backlash just because I wanted to do my job didn't teach because they were enabling their bad behavior which leads me to my next section so hopefully in that first section you see why I wanted to leave teaching and also hopefully that paints a picture on how things are already kind of getting out of hand but in this section I want to dive a bit deeper into how I think kids got to where they are today and how we were the ones who made them this way you see the education system knows it's broken and there have been many conversations many initiatives and protocols to try to remedy that teachers and admin know that the curriculum that is given to us is outdated and icky and while we can't really change our government issued curriculum what we can do is try to make it more relatable to the kids right we can try to make it more engaging and try to make the lesson much more than just your standard taking notes from an overhead projector we can recognize the horrible treatment that children of the past faced in school Institution and try to make it a much more welcoming and comfortable place for students of the present however I think along the way of that conversation a lot of adults interpreted the notion of treat students equitably and respectably as spoil the kids rotten and don't ever tell them no no no no no no no no no no no stop doing like that stop doing like that yeah oh negative negative you must apologize immediately he not respecting my St he need to apologize to me are you serious because just as much as Millennial parents are accused of not parenting their kids there are some modern-day school systems in place that do similar damage to our students in my opinion one example that comes to mind is restorative justice in education for those of you unfamiliar with this concept this is an initiative that schools are trying to adopt to make schools a warmer place for the student as well as address the misbehavior issues without resorting to stricter disciplinary measures there's some simple stuff that you can do that comes with restorative justice such as greeting your kids at the door you know learning more about them getting to know them as human beings all that I agree with that's great and then there's the behavior management part of restorative justice so the idea is that when a student misbehaves you talk it out with the student you learn more about why they did the myde and you get a little more of their backstory a a little more why they did it in the first place and usually a school counselor or the principal or the vice principal will be a part of that conversation to help mediate and to also learn more about the student backstory after hearing the student out there's supposed to be a conversation that happens about why their particular misdeed may be considered bad there's also supposed to be student peers involved and the student who committed the initial misbehavior is supposed to do an action step as well afterwards for example if they trash the cafeteria well obviously they have to clean up their mess and also maybe help clean up in the future and then there's also supposed to be a conversation that happens with a parent to figure out if there's something at home causing this misbehavior and also the parent is supposed to help out and cooperate and make sure that the student does not commit these misbehaviors in the future now on paper this sounds great I don't think I've said anything that is disagreeable so far and I think that on paper this is a way better disciplinary measure than let's say detention where students kind of do nothing in there anyway or writing I will not trash the cafeteria a 100 times like real old school I think it is so much more helpful to talk things out with a student and help them realize why what they did is wrong and get to the root of it and figure out why this student might be you know misbehaving in the first place because maybe there's a bigger issue that we don't know about and we as Educators would probably want to help with that but in practice does that actually happen well that certainly did not happen for the schools I worked at and it doesn't seem to be happening for a majority of schools who try to implement restorative justice based on the Reddit forms I saw anyway in my experience schools do a really great job of focusing on the first two parts making sure that school is a warmer place for students and having that initial conversation with the student about their misbehavior they are good at those two parts however they are so bad at making sure that the stuff that's supposed to happen afterwards actually happens there are so many stories of you know admin failing to to follow up with students afterwards to make sure that they completed their appropriate action steps to make sure that things are better I don't think I ever saw student peers involved helping their buddy stay out of trouble if there were parent conversations though that happened only sometimes they were often unsuccessful because parents would often get immediately defensive about their kids they did not want to hear about how their child was misbehaving and then of course you have the classic case of a student gets sent to a principal's office to talk about this and granted you know we are trying to make the experience less scary we are trying to learn more about the child and get to the root of the problem really figure out why they are behaving the way that they're behaving but you get the common story of how students will go into the principal's office receive a snack or a treat and then be sent on their merry way kind of like an Abbot Elementary AA literally made me take candy from a baby and she didn't do anything to discipline Micah at all well Eva doesn't discipline the kids so then why did you tell me to send them to her remember when I said you said you do that look sending a kid to AA just helps get them out of the room so that you can regain control of the rest of the class but it doesn't fix the problem and rewarding bad behavior is the opposite of what a principal should do right oh wait repeat what you just said because for a second it sounded like you expect AA to do a job what y'all doing in here kids are being rewarded for their bad behavior and if they're not being rewarded they are at least not really given any consequences like yes we talk about it but then they go off and do the same thing next week like many other teachers on the Reddit Forum I mentioned earlier I feel as though restorative justice is something that admin can post on their school website and say that they did you know just to just to prove that their school is doing a modernday social justice approved protocol but without actually putting in the work or getting the resources to make sure that it is implemented properly I should add though that sometimes it's not entirely admin's fault I mean they do have higher ups themselves they do have a budget they have to work within but I digress for the teachers who did say that they were successful in implementing restorative justice I noticed that they also mentioned that they had a team of social workers working hard alongside them but obviously this is a rare case obviously most schools do not have a budget to have a team of social workers to make sure that such a protocol is implemented properly and some people might ask okay well why aren't the teachers doing the follow-up then well I mean because we're already so swamped sorry we kind of really just wanted to teach lesson planning already takes up so much time even just reaching out initially and recording the student misbehavior and setting up the appointments for you know the restorative justice talks is already a lot out of your schedule I think a separate social worker team is needed in order to implement it properly especially with you know the amount of students that teachers have and the amount of misbehaving that is done it's just impossible for teachers to handle alone but on top of all that yes there's more I'm sorry if you are tired of me talking about this by now well gez that's why I quit teaching I was also tired of talking about this but on top of all that there are also educational practices that enable students avoidance of focusing in the classroom like assigning students Chromebooks listen in this day and I understand how important it is to make sure that students know how to use technology I mean technology and laptops and all that is used in like literally almost all workplaces nowadays however in both of the schools I worked at man the Chromebooks were just so much more distraction than anything else kids would play games on that thing kids would listen to music they'd bring their own big ass headphones and just straight up ignore the teacher and just listen to music off of their Chromebook if they didn't already have a smart device VI themselves to distract themselves with well we just handed them one and like many other teachers have already said we are passing students when they're not even grade level and even when teachers who do fail students because they're underperforming even when they do fail them the admin passes them along anyway because it looks better for their school but we are not solving the issue we are just trying to cover it we are covering it with a blanket and the Blanket's getting full the problem is seeping out I had kids come into my chemistry class not knowing how to multiply in 11th grade what am I supposed to do with that how am I supposed to teach chemistry if the children do not know how to do basic Elementary multiplication and then there's the cess pole of [ __ ] that kids see on social media which okay now I legitimately don't know who to blame for this but aside from the obvious crap of like you know kids seeing pranks videos and other mindless garbage and you know having a parasocial relationship with that I have also seen kids take Concepts Concepts that are meant to be you know helpful and useful and take it way out of context and use it incorrectly an example that comes to mind immediately is this one time where a student had to present their project and this particular student was very nervous about it I mean understandable that was like all of our least favorite part about school was presenting are you kidding me I I dreaded that [ __ ] it was awful but I think it is a skill that we all need to learn though but any who this student was not thrilled about presenting their project so when it came time for them to present they ran out of the classroom and said I do not consent okay I'm glad you know that word sweetie I'm glad you know of it uh but we're not really that's not the context that's not the context in which we use that one I'm sorry and there are so many other instances of them taking Concepts and warping them into something completely different but I'm already on page five of this script and I already promised myself that this would be a shorter video and I don't think I'm accomplishing that so I'm going to move on to the next [Music] section now in all the videos I've seen criticizing gen Alpha so far a lot of them are asking is that generation doomed are we doomed is this the future of adults they're doomed they'll never learn we're doomed Society is doomed our society is going to go down the skibby toilet and yes well I do agree that it looks pretty bleak not going to sugarcoat that that doesn't mean all hope is lost I mean [ __ ] I used to be a menace when I was a kid I didn't understand social justice at all I thought it was so cool to be edgy and everything I didn't understand social norms or cues or anything like that I mean I'm still learning that part but but I did learn a lot when I got my first part-time job I learned a lot when I went to college and learned a lot more about sociology and different ways of life and living and perspectives I learned a lot when I received constructive criticism and also not so constructive criticism from friends and people who were close to me and I think the same will happen for Gen Alpha maybe hopefully because while they are menaces now societal systems have kind of remained unchanged for like decades the behavior that they're exhibiting now doesn't really fly when it comes to you know careers that pay you a livable wage and not knowing how to study or things like that is also not going to fly when you get to college and if they don't learn to adapt to either of those situations well I mean eventually their Millennial parents are going to get tired of wiping their ass so there is also that they'll figure it out because they'll have to and I think at the same time we got to remember as participants of society that it is also up to us to keep other participants of society in line and no I don't mean by hitting the kids stop trying to get stop trying trying to hit the kids but by a normal and healthy amount of Shame and educating others on what acceptable social behavior is because in America's plight for hyper individualism and insisting that you know the problems in the world have nothing to do with us we have to remember that each of us has the power to influence in one way or another whether it's a big influence or a small influence you still have influence and yes there are huge systematic failures that we have no control over that is correct and no I don't have specific action steps that we as adults outside of the education system can take to improve the situation that is Gen Alpha but all I am saying is don't lose sight over the control that you do have be assertive if kids come to your dental office and mess up your pamplets tell them and the parent that it is unacceptable and that you expect them to clean up after themselves sometimes people need a firm reminder after leaving teaching I started working in a corporate office and I cannot tell you how many adult children children I work with honestly my workplace has a f day with me because of how honestly I speak sometimes but I can attest that sometimes it just takes some firmness in your voice and firmness in your chest to let people know that you mean it that what they're doing is unacceptable to snap them out of their main character syndrome and bring them back to the reality that they share a space with others so yes they're bad for now but let's not give up hope on them because that is what got them here in the first place so that does it for my spark noes version of my thoughts on gen Alpha are you or were you a teacher what are your thoughts on the current education system or are you a student and or did you recently graduate what was school like for you what are your thoughts let me know in the comments below and if you made it this far into video thank you so much for watching consider giving it a like consider subscribing if you'd like to see more random videos from me and I think I'm going to go lie down now so thank you okay that's enough for me bye-bye oh

Channel: SirSugarMeat

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Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024