#1
I think it's Tiktok; they don't even have time to think about the bite-size piece of media they just consumed before the next one is up.
#2
#3
Just a couple of days ago, a thread appeared in the AskReddit community, where the topic starter, the user u/MineTech5000, asked school teachers and educators in general: "What are your most terrifying 'Gen Alpha Can't Read/Behave/Etc.' horror stories?"
It should be noted that in just three days, the thread has already managed to collect over 3.1K upvotes and almost 3K various comments—so we can say right away that there are lots of stories, and the discussion of these stories turned out to be incredibly lively, and sometimes even with heated debates.
So we, Bored Panda, now suggest a selection of the most interesting—in our opinion—stories and viewpoints.
#4
Teacher: Hey, _______ where's your laptop?
Student: It's in my bag.
Teacher: Why isn't it out?
Student: It's dead
Teacher: Where's your charger?
Student: At home, I think?
Teacher: Perhaps one of the other 20 students in this room have a charger you can borrow?
Student: Maybe? *Stares blankly for 5 seconds*
Teacher: Well are you going to ask someone?
Student: Oh, right, can I borrow a charger?
My buddy says it's like they have no ability to pivot to
Plan B when Plan A fails.
#5
I had another kid who cheated. I caught her and told her she needed to take her zero and wished her good luck in summer school. The parents insisted I provide a make up opportunity and I refused. She got the principal and assistant principal involved. Kid ended up failing the class and going to summer school.
I finished my student teaching successfully and bowed out. If this was a glimpse into my professional life, it wasn’t for me. The pay isn’t enough to raise other people’s garbage children.
#6
A f*****g ruler.
They can't use it to measure a straight line. They can't use it to draw a straight line. They can't use it to draw a like to connect two points. They just don't know how to use it. At 10+ years old.
Let me remind you right away that Generation Alpha includes children born from the beginning to middle of the 2010s, that is, the first generation born entirely in the 21st century. These are mainly the kids of millennials and partly of Gen-Zs.
It is widely believed that the author of the very term "Generation Alpha" is Mark McCrindle, the founder of the Australian consulting agency McCrindle Research, and author of the book 'The ABC of XYZ: Understanding the Global Generations,' published in 2009.
"It just made sense as it is in keeping with the scientific nomenclature of using the Greek alphabet in lieu of the Latin and it didn't make sense to go back to A," McCrindle told the New York Times in an interview dated in 2015. "After all they are the first generation wholly born in the 21st Century and so they are the start of something new not a return to the old."
#7
Seniors who couldn’t do 2x3 in their heads.
Juniors who didn’t know what a square root was.
Seniors who couldn’t solve for x in x + 1 = 8.
Freshmen who couldn’t ADD OR SUBTRACT
I had one sophomore this year who could not wrap her mind around “20 more than” in a certain type of problem. I tried for a few minutes before saying “let’s say you and I go into a store. I’m going to buy some number of apples and you plan on buying 20 more apples than what I buy. If I buy 5 apples, how many would you buy?” ….”20?”.
#8
#9
The last kids of Generation Alpha are thought to be born around 2029 or 2030, but teachers are already flooding the Internet with dramatic stories about how these children have trouble reading or writing, are poorly acquainted with basic mathematical concepts and operations, and are sometimes unable to perform the most basic actions in the world around them.
The reason for this is usually given as the widespread use of smartphones and high-speed Internet—as a result, unlike Z-Gens, modern kids grew up not just with gadgets in their hands, but with gadgets that are fundamentally different in their capabilities from the smartphones and tablets of the '00s.
#10
#11
#12
According to modern sociologists, parents are also partly to blame for this, as they were so overprotective of their offspring that they actually deprived them of the need to develop all of the skills that previous generations were so famous for. Why read something if you can watch a video? Why write if you have voice typing? Why, finally, think—if you can ask ChatGPT about literally everything?
#13
He said several of them can't tell time. On a digital clock.
#14
#15
On the other hand, what could the kids themselves do about it? Or is it rather a problem of a society that literally overnight (one decade in historical terms is a very short period of time) faced a fundamentally new technological order, while the social and mental order remained largely the same.
It's quite possible that in the future we'll have to change this entire system—either adapt to the demands of new generations, or try to teach them all these skills at a relatively mature age.
It is not for nothing that the first startups are already appearing in Europe and the USA—the courses where young people learn basic skills for independent living. Who knows, maybe this is the next 'blue ocean' of the economy?
#16
We had a kid running a full d**g operation out of the boy's bathroom. Vapes, w**d, cigarettes, a burner phone to do the transactions... the whole nine.
When I try to tell them their written work is completely unintelligible due to incoherent grammar and lack of basic sentence structure, I am met with, "I said what I said. If you can't understand it, then that is your problem."
Commas are too hard of a concept.
Yay middle school.
#17
#18
So many parents today only want their kid to be "happy" but in reality, they have no idea what it takes to make a person happy. They says these younger people are all anxious and depressed...clearly being poorly educated, unable to solve basic problems, or understanding how to function successfully in an already hard world doesn't make a person happy! But parents insist that they send their kid to school in bubble wrap to make sure no one pops and of their bubbles and send them back exactly the same. Their kids are miserable, emotionally stunted, and totally unprepared for reality as a result. But no one wants to seriously talk about the fact that is 100% the parents who are the problem. You can have all the school funding on earth but if you are serving parents who want a nannies and not educators you end up where we are.
Be that as it may, here and now we have millions of children, many of whom read worse than their older siblings and parents, who have great difficulty concentrating, and whose thinking process simply works differently. So if, after reading this selection of tales you want to either tell a similar story or suggest an idea of what to do about it all, please do so in the comments!
#19
#20
