Teaching Gen Alpha

[JustSeethingPat]

Apologies I wrote this via voice note.

I've been having a bit of a realisation about school when watching a lady on a Facebook reel. She used to be a teacher and has just returned to teaching after leaving during COVID. She said that Gen Alpha are don’t care about authority and they don’t have a respect for the position of a teacher.

She said that children were showing us how they felt about the school system by their school refusal and their anxiety around school, they were showing us that this was a system that they didn’t feel was fit for purpose anymore.

When thinking about this I realised that rather than labelling children, as my daughter been labelled, as a way of explaining their feelings about school and calling at ‘Neurodiversity’ perhaps we should be looking at the bigger system more closely.

There are five or six children in my daughters class who dislike school to the point where they refuse to go in on a daily or weekly basis. These children do not have diagnosed conditions such as ASD or ADHD. They just feel that school is not beneficial for them. I felt like fighting this for ages and finding a magical part of school but my daughter would like but I have now come to the conclusion that maybe there may never be anything about school but she finds rewarding or life affirming in any way.

After talking to a teacher friend last night she said that my feelings about school were justified. She said that it’s okay to feel sad about this, as this are the ‘final days’ of the school system as we know it and the death of the teaching profession in the sense of the traditional student/ pupil power dynamic.

She said that she used to feel similarly tha teachers have the knowledge and they should pass on that knowledge and that passion to their students but then asked what if there’s another way? Rather than knowing everything about the ancient Greeks and wanting to pass that knowledge onto students, the teachers role should be to encourage the student to find their own subject which they feel a similar passion for, and so end the idea of formal learning, curriculum and testing.

Through my own work with graduates, I have found myself questioning where this will lead. I have felt at times irritated by their own lack of regard for traditional power structures, for etiquette and for teamwork. However I have now come to ask myself ‘why not?’ when answering their questions. Why Why does it matter if they come in 10 minutes late if there are other colleagues talk for the first 40 minutes of their working day? Why can’t they work from home? Why can’t they talk about their mental health in team meetings? And I think this is what we’re going to have to do to work with the younger generations. Otherwise all their talent, their perspective and their drive go elsewhere.

Graduates and freshers are Gen Z. Hth.

wobbly OP is talking about the younger children in her DC's school class when she refers to Gen Alpha.

What on earth is "gen alpha"? When are we going to stop using dumb labels to lump together groups?

@SoupDragon well we have done since the start of civilisation so maybe never?

If you read her whole post she chatgpt goes on to insult Gen Z/graduates too. Fwiw all the gen alphas I know love school and are far more considerate and polite than previous generations I've encountered at their age.

Why does it matter if they come in 10 minutes late if there are other colleagues talk for the first 40 minutes of their working day?

Because it is disruptive, disrespectful to everyone else, and shows a lack of commitment to the team.

Why can’t they work from home?

Presumably the same rules apply to the whole team. But also, as a recent graduate, it would benefit them to be around others to learn from them.

Why can’t they talk about their mental health in team meetings?

Because presumably there is actual work that needs to be discussed in team meetings. If everyone in the meeting took the time to talk about personal issues the meeting would be far longer. This is what 1:1s are for.

@Feelingwobblyandstrange but a lot of them don't, record levels of kids. Not all women wanted the vote, not all women campaigned for pay equality but we all got it because of the ones who did, the same will apply hereZ

@owlsinthedaylight and Paul who starts at 8 but chats shit for the first two hours is a better employee?

And a lot of my generation and the generation before didn't want to go to school either...

@Feelingwobblyandstrange have you seen the news? This an epidemic. Teacher retention is the worst it's ever been.

YABU for suggesting that neurodiversity diagnoses are just about how a child feels about school.

YANBU about the rest.

That is a deeply odd analogy. Are you actually suggesting that the education system as it currently stands is going to be dismantled by the actions of a minority of school refusers because they’re like the women activists who campaigned for the vote and equal pay?

Maybe some of them are being raised by Gen X parents who value critical thinking skills over automatic obedience to authority (lighthearted-ish…).

There is a global recruitment crisis across all sectors. Teaching isn't special.

Being a complete libertarian doesn’t work when you grow up and have to fit in to a system. A system which may not be perfect but is a population trying to run things as well as possible. Society can’t afford for everyone to do exactly what they want the whole time. Let’s see what happens!

Lots of problems with this though.

The functioning of society requires citizens to have a basic knowledge of a range of things. To be literate, numerate, but also have enough knowledge of history, geography, science that they can understand events happening around them. If we're entering a world of deep fake news etc this becomes even more important. This is part of what school is for.

We're talking about mental health more than ever but young people's mental health has never been worse. Just endlessly talking about something isn't of value in itself. Part of how we deal with anxiety is confronting the things that make us anxious so they lose their power.

As a teacher, I don't have much time for the parents who enable their school refuser kids. Some need real help, but none of them need parents who are implicitly agreeing that staying in bed on your phone is better than being out in the world. Kids pick up on everything, they've lived through a hugely traumatic global event, and we're showing them (broken political systems, war, threat of bigger war, imminent societal collapse due to climate change) the adult world is both scary and worthless. We have to show them something better, not throw up our hands and agree it's not worth it.

I disagree, I've got millennials, gen z and alphas and can't see much difference between how they were at the same stage in school. There is a difference between years -some years seem to be more immature at the same stage but can't see generations effecting it.

The school system is far from perfect but I doubt very much whether it's possible to overhaul it in a way that it will be more attractive to some children than staying home and doing as they please all day. So there's always going to have to be a balance between catering to them and teaching them, well yes, but we don't always get to do what we want. The system is far too poorly resourced to provide an individualised approach that engages all students in the optimum way for them.
Children who refuse school also have many reasons for doing so, a significant one being the behaviour of their peers. The way my teacher friends describe their environment, children can be subject to anything from verbal abuse to physical harm for large parts of every day, due to the increasingly out of control behaviour of others. Who would want to be there?
So yes, change is overdue but I think we need to start with the basics of minimum behaviour standards for a safe environment for all, rather than use a lot of resources on catering to the varied preferences of a minority.

Chatting “shit” as you refer to it is building connections and networking in a lot of jobs. In my role if you sat at your desk, did your paperwork and research diligently and didn't chat to anyone you’d find it a lot harder to do your overall job and would probably end up on a PIP or fired.

My daughter could have easily become a school refuser. We battled through the whole of primary school, but she now attends secondary school happily. Her peers who were enabled to stay home during primary school now only attend two days a week. I'm glad I pushed through, but I'll probably be criticised for this and told that my child's mental health will be permanently affected.

Yes. He is engaging with his colleagues. If he is actually being disruptive then that needs to be dealt with.

But your Gen Alpha coming to work late is just the adult equivalent of school refusal in this case. He needs to come to work, and raise it as an issue if he feels his colleague is disruptive. Not hide at home.

I think you're right in that we should question rules we try to force others to live by and as a principle never impose one without good reason and to benefit the greater good. However I think we should do this to strike an appropriate balance between authority and autonomy, not because we are frightened a group of pre teens will up and leave us if we don't do things their way. We can't on one hand argue for low expectations of children on account of their 'undeveloped brains' but at the same time abdicate all responsibilities for making unpopular decisions on the grounds they know best. They don't. They simply don't have the experience to see the big picture and make decisions other than those that are largely self serving and offer immediate gratification. Handing that responsibility to them because the adults are making a mess of it is far too great a burden.

Realistically, I think raising gen alpha kids to do whatever they like, whenever they like, as long as it's a "passion project" is going to lead to gen alpha adults who aren't capable of managing being employed in any meaningful capacity.

The youngest of the gen Zs arriving in my workplace as trainees in a profession are already showing signs of this - they only want to do the tasks that seem fun or exciting to them, which inevitably are the ones that are beyond them at this stage. When faced with having to learn the basics (the stuff that's boring but necessary), they switch off, complain, or cite mental health as a reason why they shouldn't be asked to do those things. Our retention rate has gone from 100% 8 or 9 years ago to keeping maybe 1 or 2 of them (and no, it's not because of financial restraints - we're continually recruiting).

I don't know what the answer is but I do think we're storing up a massive issue for the future.

No we haven't. Not in the "gen Z/alpha/x/p/q/r" way. It's bloody stupid.

When thinking about this I realised that rather than labelling children, as my daughter been labelled...

You are labelling them all as "gen alpha"

Yeah OP, why do anything in life we don't like? Why listen to parents, responsible adults, the law...let's teach our children they can do what they like when they like!

Oh yes, because unless we have the money to allow them the freedom to float through life, doing only what they want, at some point they need to toe a paymaster's line if they want money. School is the preparation for that, not just in ensuring children are literate, can use a calculator and a computer but in being trained to follow rules and the direction of others who are in charge.

Parents who indulge their children by allowing school refusal without teaching this lesson aren't doing their children any favours, unless they are saving hard to allow their children financial freedom in the future.