I have just finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. I approached it with a healthy dollop of skepticism, since I had a ton of ambivalence about what I saw as his smug, paternalistic perspective on college students in the mid-2010s. But I appreciated the backing he used in the book, the way that he is open about when the evidence hasn’t yet led to a solid conclusion. In the end, I have to say I’m persuaded by his thesis, which is this:
Current young people are more anxious and depressed than past generations because parents/greater society overprotect them in the real world and underprotect them in the virtual world.
This is mostly about phones, of course. The constant FOMO, the digging for likes, the body-image blowups that phones cause are all solidly examined by Haidt to the point where I can’t deny the existence of them. The high school where I coach has introduced a no-phones policy this year, putting the calculator holder at the front of the room and requiring that phones live there during class. (Students can have their phones during lunch and passing times.) Some teachers are not enforcing this as solidly now, I think sadly. Still, teachers are declaring the new policy a success, seeing more student work and more student attentiveness. I can confirm this: during the entire year so far, I have only seen two students on their phones during class. Last year, I could see at least two students on their phones in pretty much any classroom at any moment. So that’s big.
Haidt has shown me enough about the way social media seduces me for my attention and then uses psychology tricks to hold me still, casino-style. I had never considered how something as ubiquitous as the infinite scroll is manipulative. If I periodically had to click a button that said “click here to continue,” I would be able to use that as an off-ramp to get away from the website and to something else I’d like to be doing. So the book scared me straight. I know my teenagers are watching me, and that I can’t try to wean them off of their own screens when they can shout “I learned it by watching you, Dad!” I am on day 3 of what will be a really difficult process of stifling and extinguishing the urge to look at my phone during any lull in the day. My new mantra is “lean into the dead time.” At the gym this morning, as I rode the exercise bike, I did not look at my phone. I looked out the window, watched people walk by, checked out planes flying into PDX, and found I was singing a song to myself. That’s a way better place to be than I was before. I have long way to go, and I will have to be gentle and forgiving with myself on every backslide, but I think I’m off to a good start.
But enough about me. Let’s talk about kids and teachers.
How do I coach teachers who are concerned about the shifts in kid behavior: shifts that Haidt has convinced me are both real and really important?
At some point, I developed a shorthand for a certain kind of teacher complaint about kids. It’s from the rich tradition of “these kids are so different from my generation…so much worse…that there’s really not anything I can do to reach them.” When I started coaching before the pandemic, this was just as prevalent as it is now.
“Kids can’t get into math when they have endless entertainment at their fingertips.”
“Kids can’t be taught Social Studies when everyone at home is watching a different version of the news.”
“Kids can’t possibly be into English when their attention spans have been so emaciated by TikTok.”
Kids can’t. They are too…
Needless to say, I am not a huge fan of any educational philosophy that starts off with “kids can’t.”
Of course, there is a rich history of the older generation saying the younger generation is terrible and incorrigible. Famously, Plato said of Aristotle’s generation that they “are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances…They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” This website gives a decent history of old people whining about young people for the past couple of millennia. It’s cliché. It’s obvious. It’s eternal.
My shorthand for this attitude is “these kids and their rock and roll music.”
SPEAKING GUIDE: When using the above phrase, accent the word “rock” heavily, with a tiny slowdown on the word and an almost-imperceptible pause before “and”. Give a loving-but-still-secondary accent to roll. Select an accent to say the phrase in. Early Beatles-era White Southern preacher works well–here’s a wonderful example–but I prefer to aim for the slightly-shocked bewilderment of my Midwestern Great Aunt Verda, may she rest in peace. I aim for her judgy-yet-confused tone as I imagine her, sitting under her bouffant, at a loss to describe a Duran Duran video she mistakenly encountered while trying to operate her new cable TV remote control in 1984.
I used this phrase so often that the principal I worked with knew what I meant. “That teacher is just complaining about these kids and their rock and roll music” meant that the teacher was kid-blaming. Rather than adapting their practice to get a kid to understand their academic material or improve their work habits, the teacher has decided the problem sits entirely inside the brain of the student. If their brains weren’t so rotted by YouTube, well, maybe they’d be able to write a decent lab report.
The conflict, as I see it, is that the teachers may have a legitimate concern, since Haidt has convinced me of a troubling issue with phone-produced anxiety in our students. If our culture has produced a ton of risk-averse kids who are honestly afraid and anxious to the point that it impacts their learning, then to point that out isn’t quite the same dismissive wave-off as past versions of “these kids and their rock and roll music.”
Naming a problem, and noting that it’s a sticky one, can be a positive and essential step in getting kids to learn. It’s Question 3 in the PLC framework: what do we do if kids don’t get to standard right away? What a good team of teachers does is diagnose what’s happening, determine barriers, and figure out how to either remove those barriers or coach kids in scaling them.
A good teacher won’t say “these kids and their rock and roll music” and stop there with an eye roll. They will say something more complex:
“Huh. Looks like a set of kids didn’t reach standard this time around. What have you noticed about them? Yeah, I see that too: there’s a [lack of attention span/too quick to get anxious and give up/total lack of interest in this subject] that may be caused in part by cell phones. What can we do to both hype up our subject and escort kids away from their distractors so they can reach standard?”
Ultimately, the mindset of a Rock and Roll Music teacher is defeatist rather than problem-solving. It is, to borrow from Ted Lasso, judgmental rather than curious. It shuts down the process of reaching a kid as impossible, rather than explores best next subjects. That’s the deeper meaning of “these kids and their Rock and Roll music.” It’s that the kids aren’t reachable.
So how do we coach a teacher who falls back into the rock and roll music mindset?
First, I have to not fall into the same trap myself. I cannot say “these teachers and their rock and roll music.” I have heard principals and coaches express frustration over our first Generation Z teachers, who are far less willing to put in extra time than past generations: I have heard them express frustration with our oldest teachers, the last few baby boomers on the job, for being set in their ways. If I fall into either of these traps, I’m treating teachers the way that I don’t want them to treat their students. I can’t do that.
All teachers are coachable. Any teacher I have who believes that they won’t be able to reach a student–any student–merely needs the right approach, the right technique, the right coaching. If they believe that they are at a cul-de-sac, that “these kids and their rock and roll music” completely prevents kids from reaching standard–as distasteful as I find that perspective, it is not the final destination for that teacher. It is the start of our GPS journey. I can still get us pointed in another direction.
For starters, I need to ask the right question. Hae-Sun Moon, in another book I have just finished, calls it the wish question. I tend to use a “magic wand” metaphor: “If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about your class, what would it be?” I then follow up with something about the obstacles: “So what is getting in the way of that right now?” I might tap into the teacher’s own powers: “When you have faced issues like this in the past, what have you tried that’s worked?”
If the teacher says things like “It’s just so different now, Paul, because since COVID, they’re just always on their screens,” I might talk about locus of control. What are the things that we can do? What is a way to make your classroom 5% better tomorrow? How might a kid respond to that?
This might lead a teacher to double down on those phones in the calculator holders, which is immensely helpful. I still have a few teachers who militantly take attendance every period by looking at the phones rather than at the kids in the seats. If a kid doesn’t have a phone in their designated spot, the teacher waits until the kid puts the phone in before getting class moving. If a kid has had their phone confiscated at home or lost or stolen or something, the teacher goes ahead and believes the kid, but if that kid looks at a phone during class, they are in double trouble: once for getting the phone out, and even more for the pretty egregious lie to the teacher.
We might brainstorm, with some help from Haidt, about what needs the kid is trying to fulfill with their phone that we can try to fill in our classrooms. Does it look like this kid needs social connection? Let’s do some activities that get them rubbing elbows with classmates. Excitement and stimulation? There’s nothing wrong with the occasional Kahoot. I recently had a teacher tell me that her class that comes in immediately after our required study time felt like they needed a little bit of activity to recover from the sitting-still-for-a-half-hour-working. She now starts that class period (and only that class period) with a 5-minute Kahoot on yesterday’s material. The kids bop around, holler at each other as they compete, and then are able to get work done effectively afterwards. Without that time, the kids might sink further into their phones.
It’s the brainstorming, I think, that is critical. It gives the teacher their efficacy back–the efficacy they had surrendered to the rock and roll music mindset.
Haidt isn’t merely shouting fire in a crowded theater. There actually is a fire. I don’t think it’s a massive, terrifying conflagration that will kill us all, but I do think that it merits our attention. That said, we can’t address this problem by declaring it is unsolvable. We need to believe we can solve it. We need to believe we are stronger than rock and roll music.