Evan Porter

No one wants to work these days! Especially, it seems, the kids. Between their Snapchats and 6-7s and their whathaveyous, there's barely any time and energy leftover to actually complete their schoolwork on their own, right?

At least, that's certainly the way it appears in a viral video going around from Arizona sophomore history teacher Eli Carbullido.

In the recent TikTok clip titled "POV: This is how my Sophomores react to me asking them to write 5 complete sentences," you know you're in for a great show just based on the headline.

We come in towards the end of him announcing the assignment to his students, and we hear all we need to hear:

"In a paragraph..." he begins, already anticipating the response.

The groans are instantaneous. The class is not happy.

"Oh my God," he reacts in faux shock. The students shout over one another about how unfair everything is. The clip then cuts to a few moments later where the students are still going on about the cruelty of life.

Feeny would never stand for this kind of behavior. Giphy

"You have to write five complete sentences," Carbullido announces, and the class erupts again.

"That's like a test on its own!" one student shouts.

"Can we do four?" another tries to negotiate.

"Imagine that," the teacher says, shaking his head. "Imagine having to write five sentences."

Watch the whole fascinating, frustrating, and hilarious clip here:

Carbullido's video drew a huge response and over 10 million views on social media. A lot of commenters thought it spelled doom for America's youth. But it's more complicated than that.

Literacy rates for American high schoolers are at a 30-year low. Reading and writing skills have declined significantly, and there are so many potential things to blame it's hard to know where to start.

A good percentage of students are regularly using AI tools like ChatGPT to help (or fully complete) their schoolwork, for example. Being forced to write five sentences on your own when you're used to doing a light edit on something AI wrote for you could definitely feel like an insurmountable task.

It's also possible that social media has irrevocably harmed their attention span. In fact, that's definitely true—and not just for students—but it can easily show up in the classroom when kids are heavy social media users and short-form video watchers.

Or, maybe, this generation of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids are just lazy. Commenters on Carbullido's video certainly had a lot of opinions on that:

"I genuinely had to write a 3 page essay in one 45 minute class period what are the complaining about"

"I told my film students that we were going to be watching a movie (the iron giant) and was also met with “UGHHHHHH” and I said ????? Huh???? And they said it was too hard."

"Sounds like they need a daily paragraph assignment til they don’t moan and groan it’ll become easy"

"Tell them 6-7 sentences," someone joked.

But how's this for a counterpoint: Kids have always been like this.

Kids goofing around, looking for shortcuts, and especially trolling their teacher is nothing new. It wasn't invented by Gen Z or Gen Alpha or even by Millennials. It's a tale as old as time itself.

Furthermore, almost every generation of adults has thought the youths of their age were "doomed."

Just because the students in Carbullido's video are protesting the assignment doesn't mean they can't or won't complete it. It's his job to challenge and teach them, and it's their job to make a little difficult on him. It seems like he definitely knows and embraces that.

Young teachers who understand Gen Z because they are Gen Z might be the key to getting through to today's kids. Carbullido is one of the new breed.

Carbullido clearly likes to tease and troll his students, whom he knows follow his TikTok. But he's not the only one. More and more teachers are turning to social media to dialogue with their students, create interactive assignments, or just make them laugh and keep them engaged. Younger teachers are exceptionally well-suited to this, but educators of all generations are getting in on the game.

For every handful of commenters on Carbullido's video that make the observation that we're heading toward an "Idiocracy," there are just as many who get it.

"Our teachers in the 90s were not this cool, these kids don’t know how good they have it"

"Effective and engaging" said another.

"Meeting them where they are and speaking their language."

Experts insist Gen Z isn't lazy, they're just built different. They grew up with YouTube and social media from the time they were little and spent a year or more of the most formative moment in their lives locked inside during COVID. We're aghast that they don't read more books to improve their literacy and yet we, the adults, don't model that for them—the median American adult reads just four books per year, a number that's down since Millennials and Gen Xers came of age.

We shouldn't take Carbullido's video with such a sense of doom and gloom. Yes, literacy rates need addressing and we should be concerned about the effects of AI and social media, but in the end, kids will always be kids. What we need is teachers like Carbullido who know how to light a fire under them, even if that means playfully embarrassing them in front of 10 million social media viewers.