A Gen Z Teacher’s Warning to Older Teachers

5 Things To Know

Gen Z Teacher Explaining AI, Social Media, and Modern Classroom Challenges | AI generated by Author’s Prompt

In September 2025, I was offered a position at the diplomatic school of the Italian embassy in Tehran, Iran. Before that, I was mostly building my career as a writer and editor. I had taught writing classes at university before, but I never thought teaching high school English would ever be in my cards.

And now, in less than two weeks, my first year as a high school teacher officially comes to an end.

I am a 2000s kid. I graduated from high school in 2017. My teenage years were not so different from what kids go through today. I grew up watching too much YouTube, sharing absurd memes on the internet, and spending a very dignified amount of time playing video games. My students this year were only about eight to ten years younger than me.

At first, I was worried that this small age gap was going to cause problems for me in the classroom. Most of my colleagues were decades older than me, and some of them even had children my age. So naturally, I was worried about whether I could demand respect and establish authority in class.

I was just a kid in his mid-twenties, stepping into a high school classroom as a teacher for the first time ever in my life, with almost no preparation. In the beginning, my impostor syndrome was at an all-time high. But soon enough, I realized that my age gave me certain advantages older teachers did not have.

Here are five things I learned as a Gen Z high school teacher that older teachers must know.

1. Teenagers Look Careless, But Most of Them Are Terrified of the Future

Teenagers often look as if they do not care. They sit there with their heads down, half-listening, half-existing somewhere inside their phones, and it is very easy to assume that they are lazy, indifferent, or impossible to reach.

But I do not think that is the full picture.

A lot of them are stressed out about their future. They might not always know how to say it, and they might not express it in a neat, teacher-friendly way, but the anxiety is there. The future looks very unstable for them, and the certainties and safety nets older generations had are disappearing very rapidly. AI has created a strange fog of uncertainty around education and work. Economies are struggling globally. The job market is more competitive than ever. And all the successful people they see on the internet seem to be making stupid money by doing stupid things.

So when you stand in front of them and say, “You need to study because grades matter,” you are not always speaking to the actual fear inside them.

What futures holds for high schoolers is no longer a picture where you can get fairly rewarded for your efforts. It looks random, absurd, rigged, too fast, and too performative. So if you want them to care, you have to explain the value of what they are learning in a way that makes sense in a world where almost every decision looks like a blind gamble.

You cannot just force them to listen because they need grades to be successful. You have to show them why the thing itself has value.

For example, in another article I wrote about how I convince my students to write their own essays instead of using AI, I explained that one of my most important strategies is to explain why writing itself matters. Not writing as homework, and certainly not writing as a box to tick so the teacher leaves you alone. Writing as a procedure that allows you to think in a structured way and figure yourself and the world around you better. I emphasize the procedure more than the outcome in my class, so that students can see that the final essay that can be prompted to existence in matter of seconds is not really the goal here.

And teenagers understand this better than we assume, if we stop speaking to them like they are morally defective toddlers.

2. Teens Are Being Fed Too Much Information, Don’t Worsen It

With technology, social media, AI, and the internet in general, teenagers are being bombarded with information every single day. Their brains are constantly switching between messages, videos, posts, arguments, memes, short-form content, and whatever new nonsense the algorithm has decided to throw at them that week.

A very important role that teachers can play now is not simply giving students more information. They already have more information than they can handle.

What they need is help managing information.

They need tools to filter what is relevant from what is useless. They need help gathering their focus. They need to learn how to stay with one idea for longer than thirty seconds without immediately reaching for the next stimulation.

This is where a lot of teachers get it wrong. The curriculum is important, yes. I know English teachers love yapping non-stop about their Byrons and Shelleys and other Romantic heroes. I am not innocent either. I, too, can yap about literature until the walls lose their will to live.

But sometimes, flooding the teenage brain with more and more material is a bad strategy. Especially when many students are already spending a huge part of their day hooked on short-form content.

Sometimes, less is more.

More than ever, teenagers need the chance to go deep into one topic. They need to sit with a poem, a paragraph, a historical moment, a philosophical question, or even a single sentence, and actually learn how to remain there.

Social media has damaged their attention span. Their attention has been trained to expect constant novelty. The classroom can either imitate that chaos, or it can become one of the few places where depth is still possible.

I think the second option is much more important.

Don’t stress over covering a vast curriculum. Spending time delving into subjects nice and slowly will be much more fruitful.

3. Kids Today Are Much Smarter Than You Think

I learned this the hard way.

Sometimes I would prepare an hour’s worth of material to slowly arrive at a point about a poem or a piece of literature. I had my examples ready. I had my little path. I had my teacherly build-up. And then, after the first few sentences, I would look around and realize that almost all of my students had already predicted the point I was trying to make.

At first, it was genuinely perplexing. I did not know how to gauge my teaching material. If I made it too simple, they got bored. If I made it too complex, I worried they would feel overwhelmed. I kept trying to find the middle point, but the middle point kept moving.

Eventually, I realized something important: in some literary topics, I could teach almost university-grade material, and they would engage with it much more actively than when I tried to simplify everything.

This does not mean every teenager is secretly a genius. Obviously not. Some of them will still look at you like you personally invented boredom and brought it into the classroom as a weapon against having good times.

But the general level of exposure is different now.

They have seen thousands of stories, arguments, videos, formats, references, and cultural patterns before they even enter the classroom. They might not have the academic vocabulary for what they know, but they often have very sharp intuitive recognition. They can detect patterns quickly. They can anticipate arguments. Oh and, they can smell fake enthusiasm from across the room.

So when older teachers underestimate them, the students feel it immediately.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is teaching teenagers as if they are stupid. They are not stupid. Many of them are overstimulated, distracted, anxious, cynical, and tired, but they are not stupid.

And if you give them something genuinely interesting, many of them will rise to it.

4. Give up Trying to Understand Next Year’s 6–7 Meme

Trust me. It does not matter how up to date you are with memes.

I am still chronically online in my free time. Before I started teaching, this felt like it would give me some sort of advantage. I thought I would be in the know, and maybe I could catch their silly references and play the cool teacher role a little.

Nine out of ten times, I was convicted of having “unc energy.”

For the older folks out there, having unc energy means being old and out of fashion. Basically, you are the uncle now. The moment the students decide you are unc, you experience an irreversible aura loss. It is spiritually so over for you.

That said, I still had plenty of good moments communicating with my students in their own lingo. Knowing the memes helped, albeit only rarely. It gave me access to some of their references, and it made the classroom feel less like two alien species staring at each other across a grammar exercise.

I think it allowed me to build more meaningful connections with them. The students felt like I could understand their world a little better. Not as one of them, but enough to show that I was not teaching from a sealed museum of adult seriousness.

But if you are over 30, it is so over for you, unc. Do not even try. You cannot keep up. Teenagers are brutal. (don’t DM me about this part if you’re my student reading this!!)

The point is not to become one of them. That would be embarrassing for everyone involved.

The point is to stay culturally awake enough to understand the emotional and social environment they are living in. Knowing just enough to understand that the world they inhabit is not the same world you grew up in should generally suffice.

5. Embrace Technology Before it Becomes the Language You no Longer Speak

Do not treat AI and the internet as your sworn enemies.

I understand the fear. I really do. AI has made teaching much more complicated. I have extensively reflected on my existential crisis regarding teaching creative writing in the age of AI in another post. Students can generate essays in seconds. and they have virtually unrestricted access to tools they barely understand to bypass work they do not want to do.

But pretending these tools do not exist is not a serious educational strategy.

The world is changing, and in almost every field of work, knowing your way around technology is becoming an unavoidable part of the gig. If you care about educating students in a meaningful way, you cannot ignore the tools that are actively reshaping the world they are preparing to enter.

This does not mean you should let AI swallow the classroom whole. It does not mean every assignment should become some miserable “AI integration activity” where everyone pretends the future is exciting and nobody is allowed to mention how weird it all feels.

It means teachers need to educate themselves.

If you do not understand AI, learn about it. If you do not understand how students are using it, ask them. If your assignments can be completed by ChatGPT in twenty seconds, maybe the problem is not only the students. Maybe the assignment belongs to the previous century and is still being handed to students today like nothing has changed.

That does not mean we throw away old forms of learning. Essays still matter. Reading, memorization, discipline and all that stuff still matter. But the reasoning behind these things needs to be made clear again, and again, and again.

We cannot keep using old educational rituals without explaining what they are for.

Students need to know when AI is useful, when it is harmful, when it can support thinking, and when it quietly replaces the very process they were supposed to go through. Teachers need to know this too.

For now, it seems like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and the rest of them are not going away, and new players are joining the front row.

So the question is not whether we allow these things to exist in education. They already exist. The question is whether teachers will understand them well enough to guide students, or whether we will keep pretending that banning things is the same as teaching.

Final Thoughts

My first year of teaching high school made me realize that teenagers today are not impossible. They are not abjectly lazy, ruined, or disrespectful. They are growing up inside a cultural and technological environment that is a clusterf*** of pure chaos, many adults still do not understand.

They are anxious about the future, and they are drowning in information that keeps them on the edge, but they are much smarter than they are credited for.

Older teachers do not need to become young and act cool. But they can most certainly open their eyes to the world around them a bit more and try to meet their students at eye level in some situations. What they mustn’t do, in my opinion, is continue teaching as they did 20 years ago as if nothing has changed.

Because something has changed. The students know it, just as the world knows it. And whether we like it or not, the classroom has already changed with it.