Millennials: What to make of them? And why does spellcheck hate that word?

I'll up and admit that I had a number of issues with my ISP when I tried to sit down and listen to the vodcast (?) and that may have colored my perceptions a tad.

The title of this video did not leave much ground for compromise (Millennials: Dumbest or next greatest generation?). And, well, I am one. The format was a fairly standard debate between two authors, Mark Bauerlain and Neil Howe, taking the Dumbest and Promising positions respectively.

After a brief introduction by the moderator, Bauerlain went first. I was quite surprised that, after railing about the failings of this generation at the very start of his talk for several minutes, that he didn't catch fire due to the sheer hypocrisy at his utter ineptness at speaking well before a crowd. His performance was rambling and borderline incoherent at the start. Bauerlain consistently assigned any and all blame for perceived failings in "intellectual habits and achievements" on the generation. Apparently those who have gone before them, run and design the evaluation metrics, school curricula and such are figures who have manifested straight from Plato's Realm of Ideal Forms, and us base and flawed things just cannot measure up to these pure beings.

Fault was also found with the Millennial generation using the tools of the digital age for their own amusements, and not for personal growth or enrichment. Unlike what his generation would have done if presented with the same tools. No siree, not a chance that would happen.

Having sit through that meandering, and in my opinion, libelous presentation, I was pleased to hear a measured, reasonable rejoinder by Neil Howe. The Millennials have a noticeable increase in civic/public spirt, closing values gaps with their parents and get along better with their parents than previous generations. According to Bauerlain, those dang kids these days are completely consumed with social networking on the "MyBook" and the latest installment Sportsball games on the Nintendo PlayBox.

Howe also employed a number of fairly convincing statistics that each generation gets smarter than previous ones, bit by bit (with a noticeable exception for later boomers/ early X'ers). I was not entirely sold by his claim near the end of his presentation that the parallels between the Millennial and Greatest generations were very obvious, but he at least did not try and make a claim and have it both ways, as Bauerlain did.

Now, what does this all mean for me in the classroom?

I'm going to have to be more flexible/adaptive than those who have gone before me. Short of a massive resurgence of Luddism, the grid going down and other Mad Max-style unpleasantness, technology is here to stay, and it's going to continue to disseminate further and further into human beings' personal lives. As much as I may not want to, I'm going to have to plan to change with how "kids those days" learn.

And if I ever turn into the sort of smug...sort that Mark Bauerlain is, well, I hope that transformation is short lived.

Mark Bauerlain, you make me want to make you experience a number of verses from the collected works of Catullus, Martial and Juvenal.