Understanding the Modern Student

         I’ve started to notice a slight uptick in the level of frustration parents and some veteran teachers have towards their students. So, I’ve spent some time dwelling on the cause of this and believe much of the divide might be in the lack of understanding of what makes the modern student tick. I think it’s worth taking some time to discuss the evolving learning style of today’s high school student.

As I write this in 2022, I can say that parents of most current high school students came into their own right alongside the internet. I graduated high school in 1997 and can probably put myself in this category. I remember well the ridiculous sound of my dial-up modem I used to check my primitive email. I don’t think I probably used the internet at all for research in high school, but by the time I graduated college I was pretty good at it. I certainly didn’t have a computer in my pocket at all times during my formative years, so in some ways I think I got the best of the old school and new school.

Today’s high school student has literary had the world’s collective knowledge at their fingertips since pre-school. They know they can access whatever they need to know at any given time. They can just “google it”, right? But, that ubiquitous verb didn’t exist during the formative years of other generations. We had to know things. We hoarded information because we knew that if and when we needed it, we’d have to already have it.

Not so anymore. The modern student keeps a tidy information bank. Remember when you used to go on a trip and you’d print out maps or write out directions before you left? Ha! Now, we just figure out when we get there with our phone. We just don’t need to know as much already as we used to.

The modern student knows this and so the line our parents and teachers used to feed us “you might need to know this one day,” falls flat. The only thing they have an interest in is, “you will need to know this one day.”

I think there is a middle ground here. The modern student and their predecessors will both do well to understand each other. Today’s high school students should understand that the more they know, the more enlightened they are and the clearer the world’s intertwined concepts will become. Older generations should recognize too though, that the modern student is kind of right. They don’t need to know as much as we did. Before they take off on that trip, they’ll be fine if their dad never taught them how to change a flat tire. There are thousands of other dads with instructional videos on the internet they can watch if and when they get a flat. 

From the educator standpoint, we need to work at finding this balance and make sure we draw connections between what we teach and its practicality. We have to say, “you need to know this because…” Students must understand that you can’t google everything on-demand, in the moment, and learning how the world works just means you’re not going to be an idiot as an adult. If students and educators can find some middle ground here, we’ll both get a little farther down the road.