Like
many of my colleagues in the American academy, each fall I consult the
Mindset List for entering college freshmen produced annually by Beloit
College of Wisconsin. Designed to identify “the experiences and event
horizons of students and . . . not meant to reflect on their preparatory
education,” the list is marked by a frequent use of “always” and
“never,” reminding us that many cultural and experiential commonplaces
for those writing syllabi are foreign, inscrutable, and sometimes
ancient history to the syllabi’s intended audience. On the list for the
class of 2013, three facts controverting my own early experience catch
the eye: one demographic, one geographic, and one pedagogic. First, in
these students’ lifetime, “Smokers have never been promoted as an
economic force that deserves respect.” The Marlboro Man never galloped
across their television screens, nor will they recall Virginia Slims’
women’s-lib-hijacking “You’ve come a long way, baby!” advertising
campaign. On the geographic front, the Soviet Union never appeared on
their map, and thus “Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia,
Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Estonia have always been independent
nations.” No Cold War–era living in the shadow of the bomb, no anxiety
of “The Day After” variety for these students; they have lived instead
with the horrifying shadow of 9/11 falling over half of their lives.
As
a member of Generation X (b. 1970), I have long attributed the
difference between my contemporaries and the Generation Y, or
Millennial, students I teach (born between 1979 and 2003 or so) as one
of substance and content. As I saw it, the “event horizons,” cultural
benchmarks, references, and commonplaces that constitute Generation X’s
intragenerational language and cultural formation were not on
Millennials’ radar. I have taken to creating my own set of benchmarks to
note the important-to-me facts and experiences that will never be true
for my students. For instance:
• On “Sesame Street,” Elmo has always been a major presence; Roosevelt Franklin, never.
• Millennials never held a tape recorder next to an LP player to record a song.
• AIDS has always been a global, predominantly third-world epidemic,
rather than a mysterious disease decimating the gay community and
cutting a deadly swath through America’s fashion, art, and creative
worlds.
• During the Millennials’ college years, a large percentage
of their communication will occur via text messaging, e-mail, Facebook,
and cell phones. As an undergraduate, I had access to none of those
technologies.
• They have no idea who the Solid Gold Dancers were.
• They never had to await their once-yearly chance to watch “The Wizard
of Oz” or “The Sound of Music” on network television, preceded by the
familiar, spinning “Special Presentation” logo.
While
I could to some extent quantify the differences, the chasm between my
cultural literacy and theirs (which is not to call either party
illiterate, just differently schooled) nonetheless baffled me. As one of
Generation X’s hallmarks has been a continual engagement with popular
culture, I fancy that I am (to some degree) familiar with my students’
reference points. I have not seen “Twilight,” but it is difficult to
avoid knowing Robert Pattinson’s every move. Lady Gaga I regard with a
mixture of horrified fascination and respect for her arch cultural
commentary. For six seasons, I obsessed over “Lost” and wept
prolifically through the last episode. Like my younger students, I send
text messages, check Facebook incessantly, and relish certain favorite
viral videos and Internet memes. But despite keeping relatively current
with the pop culture my students also share, I cannot for the life of me
determine what will be culturally relevant to them. Thanks to DVD
re-releases, I can now count on their familiarity with “Schoolhouse
Rock,” but the Golden Age of Hollywood is generally a great unknown.
When teaching excerpts from Susan Bordo’s “The Male Body: A New Look at
Men in Public and in Private” a few semesters ago, I had to explain to
my class who James Dean was.
I was
stunned. Didn’t
everyone know James Dean?
When
I was their age, a college freshman, I papered my small campus with
memorial signs in the early morning of September 30, 1988, the
thirty-third anniversary of his death—the kind of dramatic and
expressive but anonymous gesture to which I was given in those days. In
my college dorm room, his famous image looked out from postcards,
posters, and calendars. And yet some of my students had never even
seen his brooding, unmistakable visage?
Another
example would seem to second the notion that Gen X and the Millennials
have merely been steeped in different cultural waters. On the first day
of class each semester, I ask my students to list on a three-by-five
card their contact information, major, hometown,
clubs/activities/athletic teams, favorite book, film, and music. Despite
being an English professor, I am most interested in the third of that
triad. I hope against hope each semester to see listed the Decemberists
or Nick Drake or Sigur Rós or even U2. What I get instead is a lot of
second-rate hip-hop, former American Idol contestants who’ve landed
recording contracts, or—worst of all—“I listen to anything.” One
semester a young woman who indicated English as a potential major also
listed Britney Spears as one of her favorite musicians. I said to her,
“Is that ironic?”
“What do you mean?” she replied.
Oh, that’s right, I thought.
Millennials don’t do irony.
Perhaps
unfairly, I want my students to define themselves personally
by defining themselves musically. I want them to care deeply for one
band or musical genre over another. A lot of my cultural bonding with
friends occurred because of music. One always knew who had been at the
big rock show the night or weekend before, because everyone wore concert
shirts to school the next day. The coolest kids at my school were the
skate punks who listened to the Dead Milkmen and Anthrax and 7 Seconds.
In high school, I found it difficult to be good friends with people who
couldn’t appreciate the Cure. At my high school proms, it was my friends
and me who took over the dance floor at the opening riff of the B-52s’
“Rock Lobster”—after sitting down through all of the Taylor Dayne, Bob
Seger, Miami Sound Machine, and Tiffany preceding it. Underground music
in the 1980s truly was an alternative to the likes of Lionel Richie,
Michael Jackson, Debbie Gibson, and the proliferation of syrupy romantic
duets (like “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life” from “Dirty Dancing”).
Marked by “deep,” literary, or socially conscious lyrics, melodic
buildups that defied the three-minute pop format, innovative vocals, and
like as not a British pedigree, alternative music was a revelation to
me and my left-of-center peers. Millennials, on the other hand, “do not
have a generational music.”
Given this anecdotal evidence, it is
tempting to believe that the sum of the generation gap between us can be
encapsulated by a “content item” like “The Breakfast Club”—a sacred
text for Generation X (and for a long time my half-serious litmus test
for friendship), the alienation of which does not generally reflect
Millennial experience. In reality, however, the difference is one of
method and mode; not only have the “experience boxes” of Millennials
been filled with different content, the manufacture of the boxes
themselves has followed a process as deliberate and structured as the
formation of Generation X was laissez-faire, relativistic, and
nonintentional.
Thus the third Mindset List item to catch my
attention actually carries more significance for the classroom than the
first two. Because “American students have always lived anxiously with
high-stakes educational testing,” there are no casual assignments,
exams, or requirements in the classroom for these young learners. They
are more dutiful and thorough than they are risky and innovative. The
truth of this statement on the Mindset List lies at the heart of my
students’ approach to learning—and I happen to have another anecdote
beautifully illustrating this very point.
On the last day of a
particularly “tough sell” class of freshman core literature, after
reviewing for the exam I told my students I wanted to read them Marge
Piercy’s poem “The Art of Blessing the Day” as a benediction of sorts.
One of the better students in the class, a lovely young woman who had
engaged the semester’s work with intelligence and enthusiasm (despite a
documented learning challenge), nonetheless raised her hand to ask . . .
you know what’s coming . . .
“Do we need to know this poem for the exam?”
I
was less bothered by the question than by its source. The student (I’ll
call her Alice) was exemplary in her class preparation, depth of
inquiry, and innovative approach to assignments. She had written a
sensitive and penetrating character analysis on one of the course novels
at midterm; she exhibited a marked leadership role in discussion and
class activities within that reticent group. If even Alice, who appeared
to appreciate the course on its own merits, was thinking such
“mercenary” thoughts, so to speak, what might be on the minds of the
students with a lesser degree of interest and engagement?
Deploying
this incident as illustrative of my teaching life would be more than a
little bit misleading. Since beginning my tenure-track assistant
professorship in English, I have had many classroom moments for the
ages—like the informal jam band that appeared on the last day of a
writing class when I asked students to “bring something to share.” (One
of the band members wasn’t even in the class.) Or the student who wore a
T-shirt bearing the Thoreauvian mantra “Simplify, simplify, simplify”
on the day we discussed “Walden.” Or the voracious appetite shown by an
entire class of English majors for the sensuous interpretive delights of
Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” And yet, Alice’s cut-to-the-chase
question reveals the implications of that third Mindset List point. The
dominance of both standardized testing and outcomes-based education in
the public schools has to a large degree formed students into
results-oriented educational consumers. Richard Sweeney, university
librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, has researched
Millennials, technology, and learning and claims that institutions will
need to change drastically to meet the needs and expectations of this
rising demographic. Outlining this generation’s lifelong access to
choice and customization, Sweeney writes, “Millennials expect a much
greater array of product and service selectivity. They have grown up
with a huge array of choices and they believe that such abundance is
their birthright. . . . They desire ultimate consumer control: what they
want, how and when they want it.” In tandem with the control
requirement, Sweeney argues, are expectations of flexibility,
convenience, instant access, and constant feedback.
But the wish
for customization does not translate into a desire or a need for
complete freedom. Millennials are more comfortable with structure and
continuous feedback than with an open-ended, blank-canvas situation. In a
writing assignment, Millennials appreciate a choice of questions (to
which they always adhere faithfully) but would be terrified if I said,
“Write an essay on a topic of your choosing using a text we have read
this semester.” They have not been trained or prepared for such an
endeavor. The same characteristics that marked their upbringing inside
of protective structures that did not allow them to fail (T-ball and
standardized testing) have shaped their expectations of college. They
neither seek nor anticipate the version of higher learning depicted in
the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” a song often heard drifting across
the quad during my college years:
I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin, and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry, or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
I got my paper and I was free.
I
hold up this stereotype of college—an addled, existential wrestling
with knowledge among arcane intellectuals—not as an ideal, but as a
dramatic foil to Millennial expectation. Their generational confidence,
optimism, and highly developed sense of teamwork did not set them up for
a prostration of any sort. In “Millennials Rising: The Next Great
Generation,” Neil Howe and William Strauss credit this emerging
generation of upbeat, tech-savvy high achievers with reversing the
disaffected youth topos of the James Dean variety that has dominated
teenagehood since its cultural inception in the 1940s. (Maybe that’s why
my students don’t recognize him.) While I admittedly find Howe and
Strauss a
little bit rah-rah about the Millennials, the
writers’ combined approach of research and anecdote is thorough,
effective, and not inaccurate to my experience. Millennials have proven
themselves to be “good kids”—polite, positive, dutiful, conscientious,
and bright. At the Catholic university where I taught for five years,
students exhibited a high level of interest in service, social justice,
and charity. There was a striking lack of rebelliousness, “bad
attitude,” negativity, and existential angst.
Also apparently
missing from the Millennial generation are an appreciation for irony, an
individualistic self-concept, and the kind of originality born of
feeling alienated and out of place. Where is the Sylvia Plath-obsessed
would-be writer who shopped quite happily at the Salvation Army? Or the
rabid Monkees fan who idolized the 1960s and lit her basement dorm room
with a lava lamp? Or the poet/actor/playwright/jack of all literary
trades who could mimic
anyone and came back to teach at his
alma mater? My initial reaction to teaching the students at my first
institution was to think, “I don’t look out there and see myself—or for
that matter, anyone I went to college with.” The longer I teach, the
more I realize that, well, I wouldn’t. They are not us. The cultural
trappings, I am beginning to understand, are just the outward signifiers
of generational otherness. The most pervasive differences are those of
upbringing, attitude, and educational approach.
Furthermore, a
recent epiphany has caused me to realize that many of the elements,
dynamics, and features of my pedagogy are quite the opposite of what the
research indicates is optimal for my students. As a professor of
English, I place a huge premium on form and genre, and on a piece of
literature’s relationship to culture. I lecture very rarely (to the
dismay of more than one student, if course evaluations are to be
believed). I decline to give my students a tidy takeaway from a text,
preferring instead to explore various meanings and encourage their
development and defense of an interpretive point of view. Shaped perhaps
by the pervasive moral relativism of my 1970s childhood, that feature
of my teaching often sits poorly with students who spent many years
learning “the test” and earnestly desire “the right answer.”
In
order to gain some insight into how my teaching style and their needs
for learning might be in opposition, I turn to our respective
generational characteristics. My Millennial students came of age with a
parenting ethos, educational environment, and political climate much
different from mine. To invoke some large-scale stereotypes, I was a
latchkey kid; they were over-scheduled. I was well into adulthood on
9/11; the freshmen of fall 2011 were younger than ten years old. I was
edified and liberated to learn that media- perpetuated images of female
perfection were impossible and destructive; my female students today are
“so over the body image thing.” While I remember the occasional
standardized test, the curriculum of an entire year did not stand or
fall around it, as my students report it did for them.
Yes, we are
different. But not—I think, irreconcilably or unproductively so.
Considering how my students have been taught to learn, to encounter
culture, to absorb texts has caused me to reflect on my own
enculturation, the prelude to my formation and practice as a university
professor.
Before I launch into the story of my own learning, a
disclaimer: Even as I attribute to Millennials a set of generational
characteristics, I acknowledge them as unique individuals. Just because
they have been encouraged to focus on outcomes and numbers, they are not
one-dimensional. Although they differ greatly from me and my fellow Gen
Xers, I have no wish to suggest they are shallow, inferior, or lesser. I
enjoy my students a great deal and have very cordial extra-classroom
relationships with many of them, but I do notice our cultural and
generational differences coming into opposition in the classroom. This
memoir-cum-analysis of mine, then, is part of the task of understanding
and embracing that wise (but often difficult) truth: teach the students
you have.
* * *
I was born in
1970 to a college English professor and junior high school English
teacher who had met in an English graduate class at Michigan State
University. Ergo, a bookish household was going to be a given for me.
While my public education in two Massachusetts towns was just fine, the
luxury of time to browse my parents’ library constituted as much of my
learning as anything I picked up at school. My mother and father must
have kept Time-Life Books in business, collecting whole series like This
Fabulous Century (my brother and I nicknamed them “the decade books”)
that explored the culture and events of twentieth-century America in
ten-year increments.
Reading these, I learned what a lunch menu from
1910 might feature, memorized the order of Liz Taylor’s husbands, opened
pages onto photos of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, semiclad revelers
at Woodstock, and Ethel Rosenberg. The World of Michelangelo, The World
of Matisse, The World of Duchamp, The World of Picasso (and similar
volumes of the works and milieus of seminal male visual artists)
provided my art historical education. I would lose myself in those
books, moving through phases of taste and attraction over the years: a
little frightened as a young girl by Picasso’s distorted faces, I
gravitated toward the tableaux of gods and goddesses by Titian and his
contemporaries. Like the culture at large, I participated in the French
Impressionist craze of the early 1980s, but by age fifteen I had cast my
lot with modern art and developed a deep preoccupation with all things
Warhol.
Paging through the black and white images of “The Torch Is
Passed: The Associated Press Story of the Death of a President” added
another layer to my cultural understanding. I found the only color
pictures—gorgeous Technicolor portraits of Jack and Jackie
Kennedy—arresting and unspeakably beautiful. Though Camelot’s allure and
the shock of November 22, 1963, predated me, I nonetheless felt
something of the era’s glamour and devastation both. Thanks to several
perusals of Life Goes to the Movies, I recognized the famous faces of
Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, and Ann-Margret. These books
of my parents schooled me in visual culture, high and low, current and
past. But my point here is less what or how much I might have learned
than that I had the time in which to learn it. No one suggested I read
these books; they were just around, and I found my way to them,
returning and returning because they fascinated me so. In my
remembrance, I had worlds enough and time to luxuriate in leaf after
leaf after leaf of images.
Nor was I only reading: I took piano
lessons, sang in a children’s chorus, watched enough TV to have a major
crush on Davy Jones, and roamed the woods around our cul-de-sac with the
neighborhood kids. More than once, my mom packed a lunch for me so I
could spend all day in the tree house at the end of the street with the
other kids. I don’t recall my parents expressing any fear for my safety
or a need to know my exact whereabouts every second.
Between my
childhood and my students’, a number of shifts in parenting culture did
away with the relaxed ease that characterized my generation’s elementary
school years. I sense that my students did not the have the same amount
of freeform browsing, playing, and exploring time that was the norm for
children when I was growing up. The Baby Boomers’ intense desire for
children and late-1980s fears around missing children, teen drug use,
and other potential hazards turned many a 1990s mother and father into
“helicopter” parents. According to Howe and Strauss, this protectionism
came to rest on one generation but not on the one preceding it:
“America’s most vexing social problems invited leaders to start drawing a
triage line between the two generations then cohabiting the pre-adult
age brackets: older Gen X teens, who were beyond hope, and younger
Millennial children, who were redeemable.”
If national fear and a
great deal of parental investment led to the protection and sheltering
of this generation, a second trend joined it, further curtailing the
amount of unconstructed time allowed my current students. The “baby
brain” research emerging in the late 1980s encouraged classes,
activities, and other stimulation from the womb on, along the lines of
the “Mozart effect.” The desirable environment became a structured,
programmed one, leading to the phenomenon of the overscheduled child
(who became the overachieving high schooler and the overcommitted
college student). These trends reflect “the urge to shape [Millennials]
into a better and smarter generation than the Gen Xers whose lagging
achievement prompted the ‘Nation at Risk’ report [in 1983].” As a
demographic, Millennials became in some senses a receptacle for the
aspirations, hopes, ambitions, and fears of late twentieth-century
America—a heavy burden to carry. No wonder these young people often feel
a tremendous pressure to achieve.
If Gen Xers lacked attention
from the culture as a whole, we also escaped any potentially crippling
expectations. As a generation from whom little was expected, we
cultivated an aleatory, “slacker” ethos—well depicted in Richard
Linklater’s film of the same name. As a slacker student, I tended toward
a kind of laziness in which I played to my strengths. I worked hard in
the classes I liked and cared about, and did minimal work for those I
didn’t. I stayed up all night to finish Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry”
for my Renaissance lit course but skipped Cells and Systems to drink
frappes at the campus snack shop—much to the detriment of both my GPA
and my figure. I knew I was a decent writer, and so I relied on that
ability to cover a multitude of sins (such as thin content or a missing
thesis). I did not work up to my potential in many classes because I
wasn’t motivated to do so. Unlike my students, many of whom feel they
must achieve on a high level no matter what the subject, I felt
completely at liberty to take my education á la carte, picking and
choosing what I deemed useful or relevant and getting by in all the
rest. I cultivated no competition with others, possessed no sense of how
my courses might prepare me for a career, experienced no desire to get
my general educational requirements “over with” so I could “get on with
my major.” Talented with a pen and addicted to literary angst, I knew I
would find a home in an English department. I figured the rest would
follow.
I worried little about grades in high school and college,
and it was only in graduate school that I worked up to potential at last
because my courses were
finally all literature and writing.
But in college, when my advanced composition instructor revealed that I
had a mere B+ at midterm, I was shocked and sobered. Didn’t she know who
I was—the best writer in my high school class (so I thought at the
time) and the recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English
Achievement Award in Writing? Still, I
never, never would have
questioned her expertise or her rationale for grading. She was a writing
specialist; if I had a B+, there must have been a good reason for it,
as disappointed as I was. While I wasn’t thrilled with a series of C+
grades I received in freshman and sophomore years, I did well enough in
other courses to graduate with a decent 3.36 or so. That was good enough
for me.
Mine may have been the last generation that didn’t expect
(or even feel the need) to graduate college and enter the workforce
with any sort of a status job. Generation X may even have been the last
college-going group to major in “impractical” humanities in large
numbers. My college friends were, by and large, music performance,
English, or history majors. I even recall a James Taylor–loving
philosophy major down the hall. A few of the most practical were in
early childhood education, on track to receive their teaching
certification. Now one might argue that my particular cadre of friends
will reflect certain values and proclivities apart from the
generational, but if I tick off their professions as adults, a healthy
percentage work within the humanities, educational, or nonprofit sectors
rather than in corporate culture. Leaving aside the dozens of Gen X
academics I know, I count among my friends and acquaintances a historic
preservationist, a park ranger, a couple of ministers, a working
screenwriter/published novelist, a harp retailer, two artists, at least
three professional actors, and many, many teachers. A close friend,
married to a Presbyterian minister, has a master’s degree in Biblical
Hebrew and a second in education and worked most recently as a
grantwriter for a nonprofit organization. One college classmate, a
political science major and sometime actor, has since become an
Episcopal priest. Another friend—one of only a handful working within
his undergraduate major field—actually majored in recreation and leisure
studies (and don’t think he didn’t take some ribbing for that!).
Generally unpressured by high parental expectations, free from the
outcomes-based “standards movement,” Gen Xers experienced a relative
freedom to explore various disciplines and to “follow our bliss” rather
than focus on career goals. Our work lives, rarely permanent, a
patchwork of talents and experiences, reflect the “nomad” status of our
generation. As nomads, we are “cunning, hard-to-fool realists” and know
when the time comes to move on professionally.
My students tend in
quite the opposite direction: extremely goal oriented, procedure
conscious, and career driven, they often astound me with their
calculated, organized approach to selecting courses, securing
internships, and planning for their work lives. Howe and Strauss claim
of the Millennials that “the majority of today’s high school students
say they have highly detailed five-and ten-year plans for their future.
Most have given serious thought to college financing, degrees, salaries,
employment trends, and the like.” The Millennials are far more
structured and disciplined than Gen Xers ever were. When I give an
assignment or announce an extracurricular event or speaker, out come the
planners and calendars (a fact this somewhat haphazard individual finds
impressive). In the process of completing an assignment, the young men
and women in my classes send lots of midstream e-mails about details of
production and procedure: “Should I do a complete Works Cited page for
the sources I have used in my PowerPoint?” They really want to produce a
correctly done final product.
If they have followed the essay prompt to the letter, addressing each
suggested
point or approach as if it were required; if they have met the length
requirement; and if they have few grammar mistakes, they expect at least
a B, if not higher. Such is the legacy of outcomes-based education.
Millennials have been taught to “the test”: figuring out what the
situation requires and then delivering accordingly. “The test,” however,
measures factual knowledge and applicable skills; “the test” does not
measure imagination, innovation, or originality. While I carefully
construct essay questions to be a diving board of sorts into students’
own imaginative responses, I must acknowledge that what I look for and
value in their writing may never have been taught them. Assignments are,
to them, a means to securing grades that translate into high class
ranks and competitive GPAs, rather than vehicles for a deeper
understanding of ideas or texts. In the race to achieve high marks,
however, “It makes no difference that grade inflation is continuing its
three-decade-long climb since the 1960s. . . . So many A’s merely
magnify the penalty of the occasional B or C. This is how the ongoing
grade inflation is reinforcing the Millennials’ fear of failure, their
aversion to risk, and their desire to fit into the mainstream.” Viewing
Bs as average and Cs as punitive, Millennials have difficulty seeing
themselves as the bell of the well-known curve. Students play it safe,
particularly on writing assignments, because “a risky and creative
project cannot earn a grade above an A—but, if it misfires, could easily
result in a lower grade and blight a transcript.” Innovation and
originality often get sacrificed at the shrine of the bitch goddess
Grade Point Average.
While I regret their obsession with letter
grades, I cannot blame my students. My admittedly lax attitude toward my
own marks was probably the luxury of a less competitive time, a less
career-driven era. For this reason I may be out of sympathy with the
Millennials’ intense preoccupation with GPAs. In any case, grading
constitutes my greatest area of struggle as a teacher. My evaluation
process would be a lot simpler and less anxiety-ridden if I knew I would
never be gainsaid by any student. With this, as with the other areas of
my analysis, reasons for the difficulty lie on both sides of the
generational divide. As a Gen Xer, I am distrustful of authority for
authority’s sake. Not disrespectful, but distrustful. That I would be
uncomfortable with my own professional authority is hardly a stretch. I
make use of a relatively easygoing demeanor in the classroom, faithful
to the “older sibling” view Millennials typically have of Gen Xers, who
are “more fun to be around” than Boomers. When that easygoing
personality then turns around and “grades harshly” (as the course
evaluations so often say), the students feel—somewhat understandably,
perhaps—surprised and maybe even a little bit betrayed.
My
students’ attitudes toward my authority have been tempered by the twin
forces of consumerism and the self-esteem movement. As I discussed above
with the essay prompt, Millennials expect to get what they pay for. If
they are paying what they deem to be the price (of time, of effort, of
intellectual currency) for an A or B, an A or B is what they expect.
Like the well-trained consumers they are, they will inquire after any
less-than-satisfactory result. While it may be the case that they merely
seek further clarification and do not intend a challenge, I have
difficulty with their frequent questioning— in part because I feel only
just barely comfortable with the task of grading. Selecting a single
symbol to communicate several weeks of a person’s presence in class,
attempts at communicating, and intellectual effort strikes me as deeply
arbitrary at best—and demeaning and reductivist at worst.
The
extreme goal-oriented approach of the Millennials often requires some
persuasiveness on my part to forget about assessment and just enjoy the
narrative ride. I suppose that I have bought into the “Dead Poets
Society” version of an instructor, one capable of rousing even the most
complacent into passionate engagement with literature. (Although set in
the 1950s, that film strikes me as reflecting a very Gen X notion of
culture as subversive and empowering.) Thus I cannot help but think that
if I were just entertaining/ committed/caring/engaging enough, the
students would all have a huge
meta-noia about literature—maybe
even about the grading system. To that end, I try to create an
atmosphere in my class of comfortable discourse, a safe environment for
skeptical and unconventional interpretations alike. I would be perfectly
satisfied if every class meeting were an unstructured exploration of
meaning sparked by (but not necessarily limited to) the readings. But
there is that pesky little matter of grades—anathema to me, both carrot
and stick to them—and I must take into consideration their need for
constant feedback and their fixation on that arbitrary alphabetic
signifier.
Now somewhat sadder but wiser about my students’
attitude toward their educational endeavors, I will confess that for
several semesters I did not follow what I now understand to be wise
advice from Michael Wilson and Leslie Gerber: “Our experience is that
today’s college students do not function well in courses with loosely
organized, schematic syllabi. We suggest that instructors deliberately
over-estimate the desire of students for clarity—and resist the
temptation to regard those students as somehow deficient in character
for the fervency of such a desire.”
The seeds of these words found
fertile ground in my understanding, to be sure. I know from experience
that transparency makes me a more effective instructor. And yet I
wrestle with a strong sense of rightness and propriety and a belief in
high academic standards. I
don’t think everyone’s artwork
should get hung on the fridge, so to speak. I believe in freshman, JV
and varsity teams; I believe in honors classes. I believe in one
valedictorian—not in thirty students being accorded that status, as
occurred within one Texas high school’s class of 2010. And Chris Healy,
an associate professor of computer science at Furman University, agrees.
“It’s honor inflation,” he says. “I think it’s a bad idea if you’re No.
26 and you’re valedictorian. In the real world, you do get ranked.”
Millennials raised in an “everyone wins” environment will not be
prepared for the highly competitive workplace into which they will
graduate. They are legion (as indicated by those rejected labels “Baby
Boom Echo” or “Boomlets”), but there are fewer jobs now than ever since
the Great Recession. Competition is a hard fact of life—a fact that the
conditions of their upbringing have delayed for many Millennials, but
against which Generation X sharpened its self-reliant
entrepreneurialism.
This ethos of equality and mainstreaming has
also dealt a significant blow to nonconformity. Gen Xers took pride in
distinguishing themselves—at least from other social groups—embracing
the semiotics of dress, body language, and style marking them as
preppies, jocks, burnouts (denim-jacket-clad smokers who listened to
hard rock), skatepunks, alternakids, or theater geeks. For the most
part, my students do not seem interested in standing out or
differentiating themselves. Thus there is no “fringe” to appeal to.
Nowadays, the alternative is the mainstream: “indie” culture is no
longer underground, sub rosa, or on the margins. I have a hard time
understanding my students’ contentment with wearing clothes, sporting
hairstyles, carrying bags, and wearing shoes similar—if not identical—to
everyone else’s. I worked hard to look on the outside as different and
alienated as I felt on the inside. For me and my friends, to conform was
to sell out. Furthermore, I wanted to be noticed—and since I didn’t
expect to get a second look for my beauty, I used my wardrobe. From high
school into my early twenties (especially my year of British
affectation abroad), I gravitated toward the funky, the army surplus,
the oversized, the Euro-leaning, the vintage, rather than the pretty or
the feminine. A thrift shop polyester pink dress with Dr. Martens boots?
Check. Black tights with white machinery gears labeled “Wheels of
Industry”? Check. A used German army jacket still bearing the name
“Hindinger”? Check. I listened passionately to the Smiths, the Cure,
Kraftwerk, and Echo and the Bunnymen because they
weren’t on
the Top 40 charts. I papered my dorm room with art posters and pages
from the New Yorker and an unusually beautiful black-and-white shot of
Marilyn Monroe. I was a culture hound and an intellectual, dammit! And
the nongirly, left-of-center manner of dressing I adopted, the décor of
my rooms, the music I swore by all trumpeted my difference.
Culture
was code, a shorthand by which we understood each other. If someone
could quote all of a John Hughes film to you, that told you something
about him. A person dressed as a hippie was declaring a musical taste
and an ethos as well as a fashion preference. With rare exceptions, I
don’t see my students using culture as an identification badge. Sure,
they watch, listen, and read (and they enjoy it), but they don’t seem to
look to music or novels or films for identification. Culture is
entertainment (and plentiful), but generally not salvation or even
revelation. For cultural production to function as code and for such
code to be decipherable, everyone has to have drawn from the same media
pool, watched the same sitcoms, considered the same movies iconic and
quoteworthy, listened to the same bands. The Millennials, especially
those born in the 1990s, have had access to such a vast proliferation of
cultural forms—network
and cable TV shows, Internet sites,
video games, YouTube videos, downloadable music, and so on—that the once
usual phenomenon of shared media experience has become splintered and
fragmented. Notable exceptions exist, of course, among them “The Daily
Show,” Olympic coverage, the “Lost” series finale. But if we accept
Richard Sweeney’s assessment that Millennials “have no generational
music,” might we also assume that they lack generation-defining film,
television, and cultural experiences as well?
And where does that
disbelief in culture as revelation leave literature? The college English
classroom always seemed to me to be the refuge of the sensitive, the
disaffected, the alienated, the misunderstood. English majors were
always quirky, nerdy, knowing, or a little subversive, and quite often
cooler-than-thou. In my textual pedagogy, I cannot necessarily rely on
the appeal of an antihero—nor can I expect that students will experience
a particular sentiment or idea that seems to break through the static
and speak precisely and passionately to or about them. For whatever
reason, Millennials don’t seem to value that singularity as my
generation did. Told from the beginning they were special and raised in a
climate of protection, attention, and privilege, perhaps they never
doubted their worth. Indeed, “most first-year college students arrive
not as inwardly tormented Holden Caulfields but as self-assured
go-getters.” If that is indeed the case, then more power to them.
This
opportunity to write and reflect on the teaching and learning of
Millennials has coincided beautifully with my own slow understanding of
the slippage between Generations X and Y. Over the course of my
pedagogical encounters with this generation, I have shuttled between
frustration and bafflement, moving gradually toward understanding and
sympathy. From the beginning, however, I have appreciated their
enthusiasm and positivity. Millennials tend to be cheerfully “game” to
do what one asks of them, particularly if it is a little unusual, makes
use of technology, or applies a pedagogy that “relates to them.” Despite
the pressure and anxiety that often characterize their schooling,
students take their learning seriously and are generally willing to
invest in the educational endeavor. Granted, they have made different
investments than my generation, more toward the sciences and professions
and less in the humanities, but it gladdens my heart to see so many
young women interested in and talented at the sciences. In a recent
honors class, one of the two finest essays in the class integrated our
literature course texts with the Federalist Papers. The young woman who
authored it, while deeply interested in political studies, opted instead
for a mathematics major because she “missed calculus.” This young
student’s bright, well-rounded competence and love of her studies is not
untypical of her generation. I put all of my eggs in the English
basket, but these Millennials diversify.
The subtitle of
Millennials Rising, “The Next Great Generation,” associates the
Millennials with the G.I. or “Greatest” Generation of Jimmy Stewart,
John F. Kennedy, and Katharine Hepburn. For Howe and Strauss,
Millennials carry potential as a generation to fulfill the “hero”
archetype, given their great store of positive energy, enthusiasm,
technological savvy, resourcefulness, teamwork, and acceptance of
diversity. If the predictors are right, Millennials will earn a place in
history like the G.I.s and the “Republicans” of Thomas Jefferson’s era,
a generational type “that does great deeds, constructs nations and
empires, and is afterward honored in memory and storied in myth.” I
would be very glad to see the students I teach emerge as a major force
for good and lasting improvement in society. As their predecessor—albeit
one from a “youth generation widely deemed to be disappointing”—I am
tasked with the important work of facilitating the Millennials’ written
expression, adding to their imaginative understandings, and introducing
them to a few rich texts beloved by me for expressive language or
insight into the thorny human condition. I in turn can learn much from
their goodwill, acceptance of difference, serious investment in
learning, and lack of interest in linking identity to alienation. In
Howe and Strauss’s generational taxonomy,
Every
generation, including Millennials, possesses biological parents spread
over the prior two generations. . . . Throughout American history,
however, the rearing of each new generation has always been dominated by
the elder of two parental generations. . . . [Members of the Silent
Generation] like Norman Lear and Jim Henson set the tone for Gen X kids
during the 1970s (though Boomers were then raising plenty of late-wave
Xers). Likewise, Boomers like Steven Spielberg and Laura Schlessinger
are setting the tone for today’s kids (though Xers are now raising
plenty of late-wave Millennials). Gen X will in turn set the tone for
the batch of kids coming after the Millennials—and Millennials for the
batch after that.
One day, not terribly far in the
future, this article will be dated, the Millennials having all
graduated. The entering freshmen in my classrooms will no longer be part
of the Millennial generation, but children for whom Gen X has “set the
tone.” Generation X’s (post-Millennial) children have yet to be named,
labeled, categorized, or predicted. Who they will be as learners, as
thinkers, as people is yet to be known. Will they be easier for Gen Xers
to connect with in the classroom because we have already taught them as
parents? Assuming I am still teaching, I will have the opportunity to
engage with them in intellectual work, to read the Greats with them, to
discuss the social problems of the day with them. Will we have imparted
to them enough of our own sensibility that they will bear the traces of
our own cultural engagement? What about Gen X’s tone-setting will they
have sculpted themselves against? What will be their hopes and
expectations for the college experience? I figure these children, first
born in 2005, will be arriving on college campuses about 2023. I’ll talk
to you then.
Excerpted from “Generation X Professors Speak”
edited by Elwood Watson. Published by Scarecrow Press, a subsidiary of
the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group Inc. Copyright 2013. All
rights reserved. Republished with the permission of the publisher.
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