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.

Yes, yes, let's encourage kids to become ever more self-indulged and totally disregard the fact that a huge part of a school's job is to prepare teens for the world of work!

I don't disagree that kids can be challenging in the classroom and that the teaching profession is not well regarded any more, but I'm so glad my DS will be attending a grammar school from September, if this is a common attitude in the profession.

I personally don't blame the difficult kids at all, I blame their ineffectual parents. Granted, I left teaching a decade ago, but the general picture then was that interaction with the parents of resistant pupils was pretty much routinely met with resistant parenting. For some kids I taught, school staff were their only consistent, reliable adults in their life.

Kids that are left to their own devices don't tend to thrive. Most wouldn't 'find their subject', they'd just pick the easiest one. Nothing about that is setting them up for a good life. There are enough barriers to the younger generations as it is. If schools roll over and admit defeat, they're screwed!

I’ve got 2 DCs at primary, one ND one NT. Neither of them really like the school environment. Too many kids in their classes with unsupported issues, too much noise, lack of funding making equipment in short supply.

The difference is my NT child will grumble about having to go to school but can generally cope with it, ND child absolutely cannot.

I’m all for kids learning how to deal with difficult situations but it’s becoming more and more obvious to me that the chronic underfunding, schools being run like businesses and lack of experienced teachers is having a negative effect on education. In turn it’s becoming an environment where very little learning actually takes place.

It’s already having an impact on kids with SEN as they are the most vulnerable. If education keeps deteriorating then I suspect there will be an even bigger increase in NT kids refusing school.

There's a whole bunch of stuff at play here though isn't there?
Not enough support for children struggling in mainstream settings, more openness around mental health but not enough tools to actually deal with it well. Children do need to learn the balance between being cooperative and compliant at school but having creativity and independence. Success of this depends a lot on your home environment too I would presume.
Good teachers are leaving because the environment they work in is too stressful. Difficult classes, long hours (planning and marking) and endless admin. A good friend of mine is leaving teaching after only 3 years as she is burning out. On paper and in practice she should be a fantastic teacher - lots of experience working with children, excellent rapport, intelligent, very organised but she is utterly miserable. Feels overworked and under supported. Primary school - nice school, nice kids, but lots of both diagnosed and waiting for diagnosis SEN. No TA and little support from the Head.
I do voluntary work with teen girls and see a fair few with attendance issues (what I do is not school related) and I do wonder what we could and should be doing differently.

When I was at school in the 70s/80s we did as we were told. It didn't occur to us to decide whether we respected the teacher or whether we thought school was beneficial for us. We weren't given that option. If that has changed its probably down to a change in parenting. 70s/80s parenting had its faults. But I don't think teaching kids they don't have to respect the teacher or go to school if they don't fancy it is doing kids any favours at all.

When I was at school in the 70s/80s we did as we were told.

Yes, but now they are constantly encouraged to analyse everything. How will this help me in my career? How does this contribute to my personal development? How is my mental health today?

They don't need all this. No wonder they're miserable.

In the 90’s early 00’s I can say a lot of teachers didn’t garner respect in the schools I went to. The students where definitely picking and choosing which teachers where deemed worthy.

I remember our Art teacher secondary level stood no chance with over half the children in our class. They deemed art useless and they didn’t care so fuck her and her lesson basically. They would refuse to enter her class, have full on shouting matches telling her art meant nothing and she was a teacher of nothing. She got zero respect from them all because of the subject regardless of how she was as a teacher. Same with a lot of the children in French class. They hated the topic so again they used to refuse to come, slack off and make a nuisance of themselves if they did attend.

So I don’t think it’s going to be a new Gen alpha thing. Us millennials at my school
got away with murder picking and choosing with minimal punishment. In fact it often led to school deciding they could drop those lessons even in year 8.

A one size fits all school system has never worked.

But also a couple of generations back parents used to back the schools and schools had a backbone, not my parents mind, if deemed I had a good enough reason or excuse that was fine and I was banned from ever attending an after school
detention.

Now schools don’t have the support from most parents because often parents have issues with certain aspects of the school themselves. There’s no parent/school relationship anymore. It’s just a place you send your child. It’s not part of the community.

I agree @OhmygodDont

I think my generation, X, the parents of yours seemed to have sparked the change in relationship with parents and school.

When I was at school in the 70s and 80s parents typically held the school and teachers in respect. If we were in trouble at school we often had to face further punishment at home for misbehaving, and parents tended to take the word of other adults, especially those in authority over ours, so would back the teacher.

Also our behaviour was felt to reflect on their parenting so they were 'ashamed' of us if we were rude or non compliant.

Obviously this is a double edged sword, as many of my generation were subject to inappropriate even abusive behaviour, humiliation, physical punishment etc from teachers, and would recieve no support from home to challenge it.. 'you must have done something to deserve it'. For many of us, it was really important that our children didn't experience the same, so we became quite zealous in their defence. Taught them they had rights and were entitled to boundaries. Went 'up the school' to complain if we felt these were breeched, and I think its just gone on from there. And now, here we are...

One of the factors I've noticed between kids that thrive and those who just survive are whether there is access to positive group activities such as scouting or similar. There is a huge lack of these groups though because adults are burnt out and don't have the time or energy to volunteer to run these activities.

This is bollocks.

If I was Paul's manager I'd hope he managed something constructive before 10am.....

Yes my mother definitely got it from her parents and basically then added extras.

My grandad was very. No detentions, if you want to punish my child it’s on your time not ours and I will come and fetch her out try and stop me, no I won’t give her an at home punishment for something that happened in school.

My mother added on the if I chatted back / argued with a teacher or refused a lesson or such as long as I had a good enough reason it was ok. So if the teacher was cocky I could be cocky, if I didn’t like French and wasn’t going to do it at gcse it’s fine just go read in the library etc slippy slope, if I was to then of followed all her parenting then become even softer as she did.

She actually argued with my head teacher once that while we both waited in reception that a teacher walking by had looked at me like I was shit on their shoe so why should I treat them any different. Now that was a funny meeting for me as the teen.

I haven’t though 😅

@StaunchMomma that is not my experience at all. The kids that are refusing school in my child's class are the children of PhD holding parents, business owners or public sector workers like myself. We're not talking about Matilda Wormwood's parents here!

We didn’t.

I was in a posh
conprehensive in a leafy area.

What we need is societal reform.

We did at my schools.

I think Gen Alpha is more Primary age, so i thought that was what op was talking about. Did people mess around at your primary school and not do as they were told? We still had corporal punishment by the Heads of my infant and junior schools and people did as they were told in class. Not that I would want to go back to that. But it's gone too far the other way.

Yup primary was the lead up. I left secondary by year 9. Year 5up was basically feral at times. Teachers more afraid of parents than children scared of failing their teachers.

Oh ok. Sounds awful.

At pick up, I overheard a parent telling a teacher that if her child said he didn't do X and there was no CCTV of him doing it, then he didn't do X as far as she was concerned, despite the teacher witnessing it. With the child present, of course.

How the hell are kids meant to respect their teachers if that's the parent's attitude?

Maybe not in YOUR experience.

My children are gen alpha and they love school. I’m Gen X and I remember kids who hated schools and had no respect for teachers. I remember being a tutor at university and a student told a lecturer they paid their fees so the lecturer worked for them. This when I was a postgrad in the 90s.

Michael Gove destroyed schools with his joyless curriculum and destruction of music drama art. Underfunding means less support to help. This has put the many teachers off. Tuition fees means that university gives less money so why should students work hard to get there. However the majority of voters wanted this as they voted conservative.

Salaries now barely allow people to afford to live so why should they work hard. Or may have a second job so too tired to work hard

From Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Alpha
Researchers and popular media use the early 2010s as starting birth years and the mid-to-late 2020s as ending birth years

DC1 was born in 2011 and in Year 8. So Gen Alpha will be Year 9 at most but definitely include Year 7 kids. Year 7 are born in 2011 and 2012.

Though you could argue only year 6 and younger.