What Are Students Like These Days?
Sure, you may not have been forced to walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways as your grandparents always claim, but that doesn't mean you know all there is to know about today's students. What will it be like teaching students in today's classroom? Read on to find out.
Millennials: Who They Are and Why
If all goes according to plan, someday soon you’ll walk into your own classroom as a newly-minted teacher and take your place at the front of the class. Who will be looking back at you? Certainly not your parents’ generation, or even your own. You’ll be looking at a generation known as the Millennials. No, the Millennial Generation is not some kind of alien species; it is the generation born in the 1980s and '90s, a group that Neil Howe and William Strauss describe in their book Millennial Rising: The Next Great Generation as students who will rebel not by behaving worse, but by behaving better.
Why? A number of reasons, actually. Millennials were born just as the "focus on family" age began, which means they’ve grown up living highly scheduled and structured lives. During their formative years, they've experienced classic "isms" (heroism, patriotism, terrorism, multiculturalism) in new and unique ways, all alongside the rise of interactive TV, video streaming and MP3s, DVDs, microchips, personal computers, video games, cell phones and the Internet. These kids are connected, but as Howe and Strauss point out, they are also "the most watched-over generation in memory," with parents standing by ready and willing to intervene on their behalf. In all, their early years have been unlike anyone expected, and as a result, they’ve surprised the world by developing into optimistic and cooperative team players who accept authority and are smarter than people think.
Students Then & Now. How else do today's students compare to generations past? Here are some statistics Howe and Strauss provide to further illuminate these mysterious Millennials:
- Nine out of ten students today describe themselves as "happy," "confident" and "positive."
- More than any other cause, today's teenagers blame selfishness for the problems facing the country today.
- Most teenagers today "say that they identify with their parents' values, and over nine in ten say they 'trust' and ‘feel close to’ their parents."
- Large majorities of today’s students support stricter rules against misbehavior in the classroom.
- From 1981 to 1997, "'free' or 'unsupervised' time in the typical preteen's day shrank by 37 percent."
- Since the 1990s, aptitude test scores have "risen in every racial and ethnic group, especially in elementary schools."
- Almost "three in four 8- to 12-year-olds use computers, outdistancing older teens and adults alike."
- Eight out of ten teenagers "say it's 'cool to be smart,' while a record share of teenagers are taking AP tests, say they 'look forward to school' and plan to attend college."
What About Their Parents? Today’s students didn't turn out the way they did without a good deal of help from their parents, and that’s why it should come as no surprise that today’s parents are more involved in their students' education than ever before. Today, the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA) has nearly 6.5 million members in 26,000 local chapters in all 50 states, which means that, as a teacher, you will have an additional support network made up of parents who are interested and invested in seeing their students succeed.
Of course, very involved parents can sometimes be too overly involved parents – intent on micromanaging everything their children do – and, as such, many of today's teachers can find themselves dealing with "helicopter parents." Named after their tendency to constantly hover, helicopter parents can often unintentionally frustrate their children and their children’s teachers. Keeping that in mind, good teachers can stay positive by keeping their focus on how they can make a difference in these families, rather than getting bogged down in the difficulty of dealing with parents who, in the end, only have their child's best interests at heart.