Dear educators, Gen Z here. Could you please teach us like it’s 2026?

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Lazy. Disengaged. Not interested in learning. Chronically online. Overly sensitive. Entitled. Whiny. Dumb. That’s what you call us.

Here’s what we call you: lazy. Disengaged. Not interested in teaching. Technologically impaired. Self-righteous and condescending. Entitled. Slow. Unresponsive. Boring.

We may not be as different as you think. As much as you might be frustrated with us, we’re just as frustrated with you.

As a new generation, we need instructors to realise we’re not just younger versions of you. Yes, we all experienced Covid-19, but we were in key developmental stages of learning. Yes, we all live in a world geared towards technology, but we’ve never known a world without it – and we grew up with unrestricted access to short-form content that fundamentally altered our reward systems. We’re now the first students to attend university with generative artificial intelligence at our fingertips. This has changed our brain, behaviours and beliefs.

Many of your critiques about teaching our generation are valid, but have you ever considered whether so-called best practices in teaching are the best practices for us? Learning in college has changed drastically in the past five years. Technology has changed, students have changed, and we think it’s time for teaching practices to catch up.

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Yes, we are disengaged

We are often lectured at for 50 minutes straight, or even 75 minutes, but we simply don’t have that attention span. Few people have the ability to sit and listen for an entire lecture, but our extensive use of social media and consumption of short-form videos have affected our attention span. Our brains have almost always been exposed to a near-constant influx of information and content, and we wish that we could focus for longer. But we didn’t become phone-addicted kids by ourselves; this is how we were raised, socialised and educated.

When you do try to use more interactive teaching techniques, you often ask us to answer questions using a class-wide polling system on our phones. Somehow, we are supposed to have the willpower to ignore a text that pops up, when you are asking us to hold our phones in our hands while we learn.

Are you using polling questions to ask us relevant questions that deepen our understanding – and your understanding of our understanding? Or is it just to get us to attend class? The mere presence of the phone in front of us decreases our learning, according to research, so consider whether the learning benefit is worth the distraction. If not, perhaps you need to go back to stand-alone clicker devices.

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Yes, we can’t think deeply

As soon as we learned how to type, we no longer needed an expert to answer our questions. Doing so much of our learning independently, without much expert guidance, has made us efficient problem-solvers, but we often opt for the simplest answer rather than thinking deeply. It’s not that we are incapable of thinking deeply, or that we are dumb; it’s that some of us were never taught how to think critically and have never had to do it.

With access to the internet, YouTube and social media for our entire lives, we have been able to find examples and copy them for just about everything. This means, for example, that we haven’t had to try to replicate our favourite chain restaurant’s secret recipe through trial and error or learn how to beat a video game on our own without any examples, in the same way you did. GenAI makes it even easier – now we don’t even need to find the example ourselves.

We want to learn from you – we’ve chosen to come to university – but we need more practice and expert guidance on the skill of how to think deeply than previous generations did. We need you – even if we act like we don’t. This is your opportunity to inspire us to engage with the world on a deeper conceptual level.

But too few instructors take on this challenge. Block our access to GenAI while we are learning and practising our skills answering these higher-level questions. Block our access to GenAI while you are testing us. That way you are actually evaluating our critical thinking skills, and not our ability to use GenAI. We want to learn how to critically think, but it’s too tempting to do what’s easier, faster and will earn us the best grade to maximise our chances of, say, getting into medical school, keeping our scholarships and passing our classes to graduate.

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Yes, we are sensitive

Our mental health is worse than that of any previous generation; 33 per cent of US students self-report struggling with moderate to severe anxiety and 37 per cent have moderate to severe depressive symptoms. We feel isolated, overwhelmed and constantly stressed about the cost of college, life expenses and the uncertainty of our futures.

Being more sensitive has given Gen Z something unique: we collectively have a vocabulary to express our needs that you likely did not have when you were at university. We prioritise self-care when we feel overwhelmed or fatigued, and we are more comfortable talking about our mental health, even though you may feel as though we are complaining or making excuses. We want to be heard, and we want to feel like you care about us, that we matter and that you consider each of us as a whole person.

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Yes, we are impatient, lazy and struggle with delayed gratification

Gen Z has a preference for intrapersonal learning that is in stark contrast to Millennials’ desire for collaborative learning, according to research. We would rather look up the information immediately rather than wait for someone to tell us because, by the time they tell us, we have moved on to something else and have maybe even forgotten our initial question. We prefer videos over written materials because we can often get the information quicker, and if instructors do not give us videos, we find our own.

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