Hey y’all! Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever (and never) wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: what it’s like to have Millennial teachers and the fact that they have kids now. All names in this podcast have been altered for privacy.
Unless your teacher is like, ancient, nobody really questions how old their teachers are until maybe middle school. No one walks into third grade and thinks, “Wow! My teacher is so young! How are they even old enough to teach?” No! Having worked with kids, I can promise you that until they reach like 9 or 10, their perception of age is WAY off. I’m seventeen, and they’ve guessed that I’m anywhere from 13 to 30. They have no idea. If you asked me now, I’d tell you that my elementary school teachers were all between 25 and 35. Do I know if that’s correct? No. They were just people. Age didn’t really mean anything to me, since I had only been alive for a relatively small number of years, so I didn’t think about age in relation to anyone else.
Once kids get to middle school, though, they start to actually notice. You know, the lunch table gossip about when someone will retire, or die, and the back-of-class whispers about how hot the math teacher is. Gross. Middle school is… gross. On a much less gross note, they notice what teachers are younger because they’re the ones who seem to have the most real lives. Millennial teachers will tell you about their weekends and their dogs while the most you get from the older ones are the pictures of their adult kids on their desk. Millennial teachers also seem to care about us.
When we started to become more friendly with our teachers, it made my parents really nervous. And understandably so. Teen dramas are full of teacher-student relationships. Dawson’s Creek. Saved by the Bell. Veronica Mars. Gossip Girl. All shows I haven’t watched, (except a little Gossip Girl), but shows that my parents definitely did. Riverdale did it in the first season. Riverdale does a lot of things. Anyway, it’s one of those things that’s prevalent enough in the media to make us think that it’s prevalent in real life. I can only speak for myself, but I think that the trend of Millennial teachers being more friendly is great. It was great for my education. When I felt like my teachers genuinely saw us as people, I valued what they said more. I did better in those classes.
It’s even more exaggerated in high school. High schoolers are usually between the ages of 13 and 18. Most of my teachers don’t disclose their ages, of course, because privacy, but let’s say that a teacher fresh out of college is like 24 or 25. 6 or 7 years is a huge difference when it comes to life experience, but it’s not a culturally significant difference, and it’s the younger teachers who seem to do really well with high schoolers. I was a teacher assistant for a math teacher this past year, and she was about 30, and we were really friendly. I knew about her kid and what TV shows she and the other math teachers liked to talk about (the Bachelor, mostly), and she knew about my extracurriculars and my family. She and another teacher would talk to me about their lesson plans, how tests were going, and what they thought about their classes.
It’s really nice to be able to see your teachers as real people, and it’s more difficult to bond with older teachers.
When my parents were kids, respect was a really, really big thing in school. You would never call a teacher by their first name, even behind their back. You would never ask a personal question, and you would never expect that a teacher would ask about your life either. Respect is still a thing, of course, but I think it’s earned differently with Millennials. Well, maybe “earned” isn’t the right word. “Earned” implies that we’d disrespect them otherwise. Still, there’s a difference between respecting someone as an authority and respecting them as a person. I think that the expectation used to be that teachers must be respected as authorities without question. Now, I think that it’s more often assumed that younger teachers will respect students as real people, and the students will return that respect in addition to authority.
I had a teacher, let’s call him Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown was a Millennial actor and craftsman who never intended to become a teacher, but theater people get jobs where they can, so he was teaching high school theater for a few years. I’m pretty sure Mr. Brown saw his students more as equals, or at least saw us as more than just students. And in return, we saw him as human. He wasn’t perfect, by any means, but that also served to make him more real. When he left to pursue higher education, it was like a rug was pulled out from under us. I’ve never been that sad over a teacher leaving before, because I’d never felt like a teacher had cared about us as individuals. His replacement is a perfectly good and competent teacher, just a little older, a little more distant, a little less like Mr. Brown than we expected. Of course, every individual teacher is different, but I think the Millennials trend a little friendlier.
Even though Millennial teachers are more relatable to high schoolers than other teachers, the fact that they have kids is always a crazy reality check to me. Like, all the memes about white kids with weird names come from Millennials naming their kids weird things! One of my teachers did that thing where he took a perfectly normal name, sort of like Michael, and spelled it completely differently and unnecessarily for the same pronunciation. And he doesn’t even like the name! It’s funny to watch them be overprotective parents, too. That same teacher has a daughter just under kindergarten age, and he’s such an anxious dad when it comes to her. When she’s at the sporting events he coaches, he enlists the players to help make sure she doesn’t get dirty, or hurt, or eat something she’s not supposed to, or wander out of sight, or stand in the sun too long, or stand in the shade where he can’t see her, the list goes on. It might be annoying if it weren’t so endearing.
I think that a lot of Millennial parents are anxious that way. Working at a summer camp, the Millenial parents dropping off their kids are always the most nervous ones. I wondered for a while if it was just that parents of young kids are more nervous to send their children off to camp, but some older parents have little kids too, and they seem a lot more comfortable. They still care, obviously, but they aren’t actively worried that their child won’t know where to go, or won’t remember which snack to eat at what time, or will forget where their sunscreen is when it’s time to reapply. They’re just nervous. Again, it might be annoying if it weren’t so endearing!
I think a lot of people in Gen Z have strained relationships with their parents because they can be rigid and unemotional. It can make them feel more distant, less engaged. I hope that as Millennials age and their children grow into teenagers, their endearing overprotectiveness doesn’t become controlling and inflexible. I hope that they are able to cultivate healthy and mutual relationships with the children that they obviously love so dearly.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. You can find me @FastFactsPod on Twitter, so feel free to tweet me anything you want to hear about. This is Callie, signing off.
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