I sit here listening to my roommate watch a cartoon called "6teen." I have watched this cartoon before and I find it relatively entertaining. The episodes I've seen have mostly revolved around a mall, where one of the characters (out of a relatively close group of 6-8 teens) works at a clothing store and others have attempted to hold part-time jobs at different stores. They have most of the stereotypical personalities in any group of teens: the preppy/ditzy one, the love-crazy one, the sarcastic one, the prankster, the responsible one, and the musician. You can see them to the right. I usually find this show to depict normal teenage behavior, and I've never been very surprised by the content of the shows. But this episode has thrown me for a loop. The teens have always been concerned with relationships with the opposite sex, as is a common concern for most teenagers; today the six teens decided to follow "normal," older couples to see how they acted in public. I wasn't concerned until the teens started speculating on the sex lives of the older people they were following. Some of the teens referred to the behavior of these couples in public as indications of their sex lives. Then the discussion turned to mating rituals between animals. All of this happened as the teens were walking around the mall, in earshot of adults, children, and other teens.
Hearing and watching this episode begs the questions: What kind of students will I be teaching? What values do they hold? How can I incorporate these values in my classroom?
My Intro to Instructional Technology class has already talked about characteristics of 21st century learners. We mostly mentioned predictions about their technology use: how they use the internet, what kinds of gadgets they'll probably have, how attached to pieces of technology students will probably be, etc. And we came to some conclusions about how those technological behaviors are going to influence their classroom behaviors and learning tendencies. Here are some of my conclusions on the subject:
I figure my students will probably be really distracted. All the texting, IMing, and shuffling through music playlists will cut down on my students' ability to concentrate for long periods of time. By the articles we've discussed in class, my students probably won't enjoy reading, at least not traditional historical media (a.k.a. books). They much prefer to "power read" and skim for the most important information. I think they will be rebellious and defiant to authority, like a decent amount of today's teenagers. Most of my future students probably won't want to be taught; I knew many people in high school that constantly complained about going to class and learning.
Now that I think I have a good idea of what my students will do, I really want to start thinking about the values my students hopefully will possess. I think they'll be much more concerned with social status and their relationships than my generation. Considering the way social networking sites have absolutely exploded all over the world in the past few years, I can only imagine what kind of websites my students will be spending most of their time on. In developing those relationships, my students will probably be more susceptible to peer pressure when it comes to illegal behvaiors such as vandalism, drinking, and drugs. I also think my students will hold both their religion and ethnicity(ies) close to their heart. As people seem to become more similar throughout the world, they search for ways to make themselves different. Religion and ethnicity have very different social customs by which my students can differentiate themselves from others.
I think I have a relatively easy subject in which I can incorporate these values, especially social networking. To me, studying history means studying how relationships between groups of people changed and how the leaders facilitated those changes. I can really incorporate ethnic identity when I teach about these changing relationships, because so many conflicts between groups started as a misunderstanding of or discrimination against either group. I also have to take the technological use of my students into consideration when planning lessons. And here is where I can see myself getting stuck. Right now I don't know how to work Facebook, for example, into my lessons. Or text messaging. So it's going to be a process for me to figure out how to incorporate them into the classroom, but I'm positive I'll figure out a way. High schoolers aren't that scary...are they?
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