This High School Teacher Lists Things Students Do *Now* That Would Send Our High School Selves "Into A Coma"
“There is such a lack of care that goes into everything.”
Remember being in high school and working on a class project until the wee hours of the morning, hoping to get a good grade? Lugging your textbooks from one class to the next? Having a late-night cram session with your friends before finals? Really working to get that “A”? Yeah...that doesn’t really happen anymore, according to one high school teacher.
TikTok user Mrs. H is sharing the ways that high schoolers today behave that may send our old high school selves “into a coma.” As she listed all the things high schoolers do (or don’t do), one common theme emerged: kids today just... don’t care!
They have zero internal motivation.
“They are not intrinsically motivated to do really anything,” TikTok user Mrs. H admits.
“There is such a lack of care that goes into everything. I could probably count on one hand the amount of assignments I've received in the last ten years that I've been like, ‘Wow, you really put your all into this. I can tell you worked hard.’ That has happened maybe a handful of times.”
They move so slowly.
“Everything they do is at this pace,” she said while moving her body in slo-mo. She says they come up to her desk so slowly, speaking at a “glacial pace,” while she is trying to get them to have a bit more pep.
“So slow, it stresses me out. I'm a fast-paced person, and they just move at a glacial pace always,” she said.
They don’t eat.
She swears that her high schoolers skip meals. “They do not eat. They will go the whole day without eating. I don't know why. I don't know how. Sometimes I do that too, from really stressed or really busy. Like, I'll skip a meal, whatever. It is constant for them. I don't get it. I'm a hungry girl, so I don't know. It couldn't be me,” she said.
They don’t take ownership of anything.
When Mrs. H calls out a kid in her class for texting, she is never surprised when her student denies the allegation or makes up some sort of excuse as to why they were breaking the rules.
“They just do not own up to their mistakes, and I think that's going to be a really big problem for this generation moving forward in life,” she admits.
They don’t figure things out for themselves.
“They have a really hard time of navigating directions, trying to define something. If they don't know something, they will just give up and leave it blank. They do not use their brains to figure out,” she says.
High school students today don’t look at a set of directions and try to problem-solve for themselves. Instead, they make it the teacher’s problem.
They don’t ask themselves, “What should I say here?” to figure out, or “What do I put on this blank line?" when the directions clearly say, "Put this on a blank line."
“They do not use the clues around them to inform their decisions and ideas, and they just do not figure stuff out on their own. I could probably come up with a lot more, but I think we'll leave this at two parts for now,” she concluded.
People in the comments shared their opinions on Mrs. H’s take along with some theories as to why high school kids today are acting this way.
“they've been conditioned to get their dopamine from what others are doing/social media. it no longer comes from what they do or achieve personally,” one user wrote.
Another questioned, “Is this entire generation…depressed? Because if this were describing the behaviors of one person, that person would be referred to a therapist for depression. I say this as someone whose been on antidepressants for like a decade”
Another user wrote, “Here’s the thing - they don’t have any hope. We had the belief that we could do/be/have anything. They don’t have that anymore - jobs don’t pay if you can get one and even then they can’t afford to live. What is the point of killing themselves if the future is so bleak?”
One user said, “The biggest thing that would send my HS self into a coma is the constant negotiating and questioning of my decisions as the adult in the room (and I don’t mean questioning content).”
A fellow teacher chimed in and wrote, “This is every student everywhere. I teach middle school and we have the same issues.”
One user said this is not just a thing with kids this age in the classroom, but they’re also acting like this in the workplace.
They wrote, “I work for Popular Coffee Chain and we're definitely seeing this in younger new hires as well 😬”
If you really want to feel down, check out Mrs. H’s original video about high school students today here.
