I remember someone on here saying zoomers treat teachers the way boomers treat retail workers and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Seriously, some people act like teachers are servants for their students and take “the customer is always right” mentality and turn it into “the student is always right”, when no, they’re not, especially when the attitude of some students boils down to, “I can’t believe this bitch Karen expects me to actually show up to class, read these texts, and analyze them 🙄 I’m going to speak to the manager email the department chair if you hold me accountable for missing class and not turning in work all semester”
I’m thinking about college students because my mom has been a professor for +30 years and she’s like, clearly the first person to have ever told some of these adults “no” in their lives lol. She’s always willing to help students who are struggling but trying, but she has no tolerance for students who do things like *checks notes* literally laugh in her face when she told them they didn’t meet the minimum requirements for an assignment, and then act shocked when she kicked them out of her office for that lol. Or students who were shocked that they were marked absent for missing class because they went on vacation or decided to sleep in–literally, a student had a mandatory conference scheduled, missed it, and later sent an email saying, “Sorry, I decided to sleep in.” My mom was like “?? So you decided it was fine to waste my time??? And now you expect me to go out of my way to reschedule with you??”
And that’s the thing. A lot of these zoomers are mentally stuck in high school and think teachers aren’t people and have no lives of their own outside the classroom, so they should have to bend over backwards to accommodate students who feel like they have no obligation to meet the requirements of courses they signed up for. It’s the same thing when students are outraged that they face penalties for missing deadlines (when they don’t have accommodations from the university for a disability, of course), but teachers don’t make deadlines because they hate students, it’s because they have deadlines, too, and need to have the assignments turned in to give students grades! You don’t have deadlines because your teacher is a bitch, you have deadlines because that’s how the adult world works, and it doesn’t revolve around you.
Some of these zoomers even lie to get out of their responsibilities, too. Recently, again, a student emailed my mom like “oh I’m late to your class every day because I have a class before that, which ends in the first 5 minutes of your class, and my professor won’t let me leave early :(” And my mom was like, “….The university’s computer system literally would not let you register for a class with a scheduling conflict like that. I double-checked this with the head of the department.” And then the student got real quiet 🤡
Like, ya’ll are supposedly adults lol, fucking act like it instead of acting like rude, entitled, overgrown 9th graders to teachers
@wingsy-keeper-of-songs I don’t get why zoomers think it’s okay to act like this at all. I would have had my ass handed to me if I pulled anything like this.
Some people are just dicks, of course, but my mom thinks the increase in this behavior is from the pandemic. Her colleagues have been lamenting similar behavior in their classes, too, like students refusing to turn on their cameras for virtual classes and just not doing in-class activities online. They really just sit there with no microphone or camera all class, do nothing all senester, and expect to get full participation points or whatever.
My mom is seeing a really academically behind group of students this year, but again, she’s willing to work with the ones who try. For the ones who miss class and don’t do assignments and lie in their excuses, her theory is that these are students who got away with not doing much work for two years and just lied and didn’t face any consequences from their overwhelmed high school teachers during the pandemic. So they came to college thinking they could do the same minimal amount of work, miss class whenever they feel like it, and still skate by with a C, and they’re shocked when professors are like “no, you missed half of our classes by the midway point of the semester, you need to withdraw or take the F.” It’s a generation used to having their parents call up their high school teachers and complain whenever they get a bad grade. Once again: very “I’m going to speak to the manager.” There’s usually an appropriation of the language of social justice, too, like people saying deadlines are ableist because they have anxiety. In my mom’s experience, the students who actually have accommodations from the disability resource center aren’t doing this—those students work hard—it’s the ones who do nothing all semester and are outraged by their bad grades at the very end. And for the record, my mental health was in the gutter in college, but I never acted like this lol. Maybe it was because I knew teachers are actual people, idk
I’m definitely going to second that pandemic point. I work as an RA, and my primary purpose is to help out students and make sure they get connected to campus resources. I have a lot of good eggs, but I will say, this year’s batch of freshmen is by FAR panning out to have some of the most flagrant displays of inconsideration than I’ve seen in my whole career.
It’s to the point that me and my whole division had a long meeting discussing the sudden influx in immaturity and disrespectful behavior and how best to wrangle it. There’s no pattern or predictable measure for who’s being troublesome—any income, any race, any gender, ALL of those categories have at least two or three individuals that are overwhelmingly destructive and unmindful. The only common factor is that it’s THIS year’s batch—the one fresh out of over two years of pandemic high school.
We have a crackpot hypothesis that the individualism that came from pandemic isolation was truly detrimental to students’ social and empathic development. We have no proof but we seriously cannot think of any other explanation for this. Please be kind to people who work with college students—this year in particular, we’re being put through the wringer.
My Dad worked as a teacher for over 25 years before the pandemic. I once asked him what the most important thing about school was, what the most important thing kids learned was. He told me it was how to live in the world with other people. He’s also said that if a kid comes to class who was previously homeschooled, YOU CAN TELL, because the kid will be less skilled in waiting their turn to talk, for example. So, it seems that schools’ most important job really is socializing kids, as we now have massive amounts of data on what happens when every kid is homeschooled.
