Y’all like the sound of my air conditioning? Audio here is a work in progress.
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: an introduction to season 2, a life update, and some thoughts on transitioning into the next school year for all different age groups.
Welcome back everybody, and hello to any new ears. My name is Callie, I’m 18 years old, and I am from and currently live in North Carolina. If you like podcasts about navigating life as a sort-of adult, education, social commentary, philosophical nonsense, and sometimes regular nonsense, you’ve come to exactly the right place. I hope you laugh sometimes, and if you’re my mom and emotionally attached to my experiences, I hope you cry sometimes too. Mostly, I hope you enjoy your time with me.
Now onto the life update. You may or may not notice a slightly different sound to the podcast, and that’s because I’m in an entirely new location! I’m not actually sure if it’ll affect the sound. You should tell me! Anywho, I’m recording this from college in western North Carolina, way up in the mountains where the clouds are roughly eye-level. Driving around here is quite… foggy. It’s truly lovely here, at least for me. It’s a little scary, but not for any of the reasons I expected. Making friends turned out to be easy, talking to professors and faculty turned out to be easy, navigating campus isn’t particularly easy but it’s not hard either. What I did not anticipate is being so acutely aware of the presence of bears. I knew they were around, sure, but I thought they would be more… in the woods. Nope! I’ve been here for a little over a week and there’s already been a bear on the patio of the biggest, most central dorm on campus… twice. So that’s a hazard I didn’t particularly anticipate. Nonetheless, I’m ready to practice my bear-avoiding skills, and if necessary, my be-extra-loud-and-scary skills. In conclusion, college so far is good, minus the bears.
Obviously my transition to college is fairly big, but when I think about the shift into this school year, my thoughts turn towards younger kids. At camp this summer, I noticed that kids of all age groups were behaving pretty differently than in years past. This wasn’t particularly unexpected, of course. I was sure that the pandemic would be affecting kids. I just wasn’t really expecting the ways it would affect them.
Let’s start with the little kids, like 5 or 6. For a lot of them, this year at camp was the first time they had interacted with groups of other kids, ever. Now, this kind of thing happens every year, where camp might be the first place some kids really engage with other kids, but this year, it was nearly everybody. They didn’t really know what to do. Conflict resolution skills were at an all-time low, and the ability to share and empathize with other people was also hard to find. In general, we had more campers than usual who had higher support needs than usual. All kids have support needs, hell, all people have support needs, but the littles this year just generally needed… more. Struggled to find their things. Struggled to ask for help with words. Struggled to put their things in their backpacks. Struggled to understand games and teamwork. Again, these things are all normal in individuals or one at a time, but when most of the kids have a lot of support needs, that’s when it’s unusual. The staff got into the habit of describing some of them as “COVID-age.” Like, “Oh, that camper? Yeah, he’s 5, but he’s a COVID-5.” That means he has the mobility and types of interests as a 5 year old, but the types of support needs and communication ability you’d generally find in a kid closer to toddler age.
The seven-year-olds were… how can I put this… surprisingly normal? These are the kids who probably went to preschool, probably went to in-person kindergarten, maybe have been to a summer camp before. They’ve been through a significant amount of change, and they’re at the perfect age to adapt to that change as if it were normal, even though there are still adverse effects. You could definitely tell which of them had a relatively stable pandemic and which went through a lot of hardship – losing a parent or someone else close to them, financial hardship, other instability. But overall, they’re pretty resilient. I want to point out now that there are exceptions to every rule and I didn’t do any formal data collection, this is just what I observed and remember. Not every kid of every age group is exactly how I’ll describe, I just think that patterns and trends are both interesting and important.
Now onto the next age group. The eight and nine year olds can really go either way, which is interesting. Either they’re still sort of seven, kind of young, kind of immature, not super aware of other people or willing to resolve conflicts. Or, they definitely had to grow up way too fast. They’re quiet kids who would look responsible and mature any other year, but because we know the context of everything they’ve been through, we know that they’re people-pleasers, nervous about making new friends, petrified of being in trouble or being burdens. Honestly, the ten, eleven, and twelve years olds are mostly like that too. I don’t see big friend groups the way I used to. The kids link up into pairs or trios that they connect with and cling to that safety. Bigger groups feel scary. The ten to twelve year olds also have abnormally good conflict resolution skills. In some kids, that’s awesome to see because I know it’s because they’re empathetic and understanding and seek to get along well with others. In some kids, it makes me a little sad because I know they’ve developed all those same qualities, but for different reasons than the regular emotional maturity process. They’ve had to see stressed adults be stressed for a long time, and they want to help in any way possible, and they get stressed in return when they can’t help or can’t read the situation. I love them so much and I want them to be kids. They want to grow up so bad and not even in the usual way. I wouldn’t be worried if they were having crushes and discussing one of our various non-camp-appropriate topics, but they’re trying to take on adult responsibilities and worry about things that they don’t need to worry about because they’re kids and we’ll take care of it. They’re so sweet. I love them. All I want is for them to be happy and be kids.
This year, we included teen camp. We had a camp group with kids aged 13-15, and we had never done that before, ever. We usually have Counselors-In-Training, or CITs, who are that age group and who help out around camp, but we didn’t have that program this year, for a variety of reasons. One, we wanted to avoid mixing age groups as much as possible. That was impossible at times, like during severe weather where we had to share shelters, but in general, we wanted to keep bubbles in their bubbles. Two, we downsized camp groups and staff this summer, and we usually have so many CITs that if they were included, we would’ve been overrun. Picture twelve to fifteen kids, plus three staff and four CITs. It would’ve been unreasonable. But we didn’t want to just exclude teenagers altogether, because a lot of them love camp and that felt unfair and sad. So teen camp was born! And it was a very, very interesting experiment. We didn’t really know what to expect, but what we got was absolutely not what we expected. CITs are usually pretty passionate about camp, guided by their job as CITs and their CIT mentor, and generally really creative and enthusiastic and fun to have around. This year… whether it was because of the pandemic or because the vibes of teen camp appealed to different people than the CIT program did, the teens behaved very differently. They just… didn’t participate much. In anything. And they weren’t bored or sad! They just wanted to have free time. Usually free time includes fort-building or whittling or crafts, but they usually just wanted to sit and talk. Which can be nice sometimes, especially with that age group because their conversational ability is basically at the adult level, but all day, every day, it feels a little odd. As counselors, we struggled with them because our model of camp was just different from what they wanted out of camp. We tried our best to adapt to what they wanted, but it was stressful for us because we felt like we weren’t delivering on the experience that they and their parents expected. Teen camp was an experiment, and I’m not sure what the administration is going to do with the results.
Regardless of whether my observations are accurate and apply to entire age groups, it seems safe to say that transitioning into this new school year will be a challenge. Some kids haven’t been inside a classroom since March of 2020. That’s an entire school year and then some. I’m amongst those students. When I walked into my first college class, masked up but otherwise normal, I thought, “whoa.” I didn’t really know what to do. I said hello to my professor and took a seat. I fell back into the routine of how school works, but it felt stilted. I was half a step behind for my first few classes. Now that I’ve been to each one a couple times, it feels better, more normal, but I also have twelve years of public school muscle memory to fall back on. And, college was going to be a transition anyway, so it’s not like I was expecting to know exactly what I was doing from the get-go.
Even if the physical transition back to in-person school works out, the mental transition is certainly not going to be easy. The kids have endured so much stress, much more than most of them can understand, certainly more than they can easily handle and adjust to. That kind of sustained fear and confusion and anxiety is difficult to live with, for one thing, but the social and behavioral implications are what make me wonder more. Some kids have developed really strong emotional regulation skills. Some have gone in the opposite direction. I’m curious about how those types of kids are going to interact. I’m curious about how teachers, who are dealing with a whole host of other issues right now, are going to have the capacity to handle all of the kids’ new needs on top of lacking support from their district and feeling stressed about COVID themselves. All elementary and many middle school students are ineligible to be vaccinated at this time, so I feel like they’re all in basically the same boat that we’ve been in this whole time. I’ve seen teachers of that age group speak about feeling exhausted, stressed out, undersupported, overwhelmed, etc, even before the school year started. It’s scary, y’all.
As far as COVID stuff goes at college… well, it goes. My confidence in my school’s contact tracing ability is low. I know that a lot of us are fully vaccinated. Probably more than the average school, given what I know about the trends in our student body. I know a lot of the staff are too. Everyone is pretty compliant about the indoor mask mandate in academic buildings. In residential buildings… it varies by building. The people in my dorm are pretty good about it. I wouldn’t say the same about some others. There’s always the question of masking when you’re in someone else’s room. I usually choose to wear one, but should they? Should their roommate have to put one on if I come into their room as a guest? The communication about positive cases has not been great. Access to the health center has not been great, but that’s because they don’t want us to panic-rush our two nurses. Should we mask outdoors? How outdoors and alone do we need to be to take masks off? Some of these can be answered by rules or guidelines, but for a lot of these situations, people just use their own judgement skills. And of course, because this has been and still is an evolving situation, nobody is sure what decisions are the best, and there’s really no way to find out exactly what is the right thing to do. We make the best decisions we can make informed by what we know and what we’re told and what we value, and then things change and we make new decisions, and that’s literally the best we can do. And I hate that! Because when people are still getting sick and getting others sick and dying and experiencing long COVID symptoms and won’t get vaccinated, it feels like it isn’t enough. But it’s what we can do. So we’ll keep doing it.
I think my conclusion about the Kids These Days is this: they’re not alright. But they’re adaptable, and they have a lot of people rooting for them. There are a lot of hard things to do to keep everyone afloat, but I’m confident we can do those things. Teachers, as always, are incredible and doing such difficult work and should be getting more support. None of those things are new, but they are especially true now. The kids, as a whole, will be alright. Some will get sick. Some already have. That’s pretty fucking terrible. Hopefully schools will respond appropriately. It is better to protect students and families by continuing with remote learning than it is to send them in and wait until it gets bad to change things. I wish that more of my classes met outside. About half of them do, just because the professor wants to. It’ll be alright. I have to tell myself that in order to make it to tomorrow, and the next day. I’ve gotten exposed to COVID and tested negative, thanks to being vaccinated and masking and eating outside.
We’re doing our best out here.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m not sure what my upload schedule is going to be, so be sure to follow this podcast wherever you get it so you can be notified every time I release a new episode. I have lots of ideas, so you won’t want to miss a single one! You can also follow me on Twitter @FastFactsPod, and you can find transcripts of every episode on my website: www.fastfactsforgenz.wordpress.com This is Callie, signing off.
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