Becoming a Professor Again- 2

Travels in the land of Gen Z

Dear Global Jigsaw,

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.

(If any of this is confusing to you, dear reader, it’s because you missed the prequel to this post. Click here for Part-1)

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 that 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.

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