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As regular readers will be aware, I have often opined that the best way to travel is to appreciate a new land for what it is, rather than complaining about what it is not. Consequently, I was determined to approach my time with Gen Z with a similar frame of mind.
It was easy to focus on their flaws, chief among which was denuded cognitive endurance, resulting from a fractured attention span. Cognitive endurance is the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time. Gen Z does not possess it. Despite explicit and oft-repeated rules prohibiting the use of phones in the classroom, most of the students were physically incapable of complying. It was painful to see them steal surreptitious glances at their mobiles, as though possessed by a force beyond their control.
What I fast realized was that my presumed template of professordom, walking into the classroom, giving a commanding lecture on the topic for the day while students hung on to every word, and bowing ever so slightly at the end, in recognition of their raucous appreciation, was total fantasy. My wards simply did not have the capacity to listen with full attention for long stretches of time.
Instead, I changed my pedagogic approach, to check in with them every few minutes. I broke up my “lecture” into more of a call and response workshop, wherein the students realized that they would need to contribute to the class at any moment. I also learned to frequently ask whether they knew what I was talking about, rather than assuming it. My sphere of assumed knowledge only intersected with theirs occasionally. An early mistake was to talk about the 2010 eurozone crisis for 20 minutes, without realizing that almost no one knew what the eurozone was.
Despite what my descriptions thus far might have led you to believe, my students were intelligent, but the informational environment within which they had grown up was so completely different to mine, that our generation gap could at times feel inter-planetary.
Their presentation skills proved to be much better than their written work, underscoring my sense of the primacy of orality in their culture. Given the search engines at their fingertips, they were able to discover and marshal large quantities of information quickly, often impressing me with how fast they became conversant with topics they had started out with very little knowledge of.
They were also surprisingly open to criticism of a United States-centered world view, quick to point out the arrogance and hubris that often-characterized American foreign policy. They seemed far less convinced that China was evil, and far more sympathetic to the Islamic world than I would have guessed at the outset. Discussing different perspectives from those usually expressed in American mainstream media did not have me stepping on eggshells, in the way I’d feared I might have had to.
I realized that my students represented a very specific North American demographic. They expected their Gen X compatriots to be unselfconsciously bigoted, morally tarnished by their formative environments, in much the same way that I saw the Gen Zs as helpless against the siren call of their mobile phones.
What proved to be confounding, given my own liberal left leanings, was that in class it was me who was suddenly arguing for perspectives from the conservative right. The reason was that the whole point of my class was to eschew holy cows. We were gathered not to focus on what we might consider to be the “right” perspectives. Rather, it was a plurality of points of view that we were intended to examine. What I wanted for my students was the ability to understand a stance that they might not identify with.
Why would somebody feel differently from you? What if you had to admit that they had a point? It might be discomfiting, but the only way to grow intellectually is by honing the ability to step beyond your comfort zone. Surely, I told my students, it's why you have come to Spain. To comprehend that the ways you grew up considering to be “normal,” are in fact part of a diverse bouquet of normalities, an understanding that demolishes the idea of the normal all together.
But there were no takers in my class for the “wrong” perspectives. So, it fell to me to argue why perhaps the repatriation of colonial loot might not be considered a good idea, or to elucidate the social problems that immigration from culturally dissonant places could (and often did) lead to. The “situation” in Gaza and Israel inescapably came up, but was always discussed in anodyne terms, with no one expressing an opinion on the “events.” I spent two classes on representations of Muslims in the mainstream US media. But the one Muslim student (a young man of Egyptian descent) in the class refused to contribute to the discussion, saying that he was not comfortable participating.
At one point, I asked the class straight up if they self-censored themselves. Did they deliberately stop themselves from expressing opinions? All of them replied that they did. It was important to do so, one of my brightest students explained, to make sure that one did not inadvertently cause harm to the listener. Avoiding “harm,” causing offense, or discomfort, was paramount in this Gen Z cohort’s worldview.
Another student, who was majoring in political science, said that she didn’t tend to self-censor when debating issues with people on the opposite (conservative) side of the political divide. But when her interlocutor belonged to the Left — the ideological descriptor that the student herself identified with — she was more circumspect, lest she be misconstrued as “deviant” (my word, not hers).
At the end of the semester, I invited the students to my home one afternoon. We played charades and drank tea. As they were leaving, I reminded them repeatedly to make sure they had their phones, chargers and backpacks with them. In the event, a boy left his jacket behind. He sent me an email later in the day asking me to bring it to class (we had one final exam left) the following week. “If you like, I can send you a reminder on the day,” he wrote. It made me smile. I’d learned the hard way that I always needed to send them reminders “on the day” regarding assignments. And it was sweet (though unnecessary) to be at the receiving end of the offer.
There was one other thing that another student had left behind. A postcard with a long note, scribbled in tiny print. It was a thank you note, and it might be the loveliest gift I have ever received.
“I feel that with your guidance I have grown in ways I never thought possible. Your encouragement to question, explore and challenge ideas has empowered me to approach learning with a newfound curiosity and confidence.”
Gen Z might be a foreign country. But like everyplace there are things to appreciate about it.
