The Millenial Teacher
Kristine Johnson, Class of '04
Pedagogy
Volume 6, No. 1

The millennial generation has arrived in our classrooms as both teachers and students.1 The millennial generation, often called “millennials,” is the name sociologists have given to Americans who were born after 1980 and who graduated from high school beginning in 2000. Assuming that a 2000 high school graduate spent four years in college, she could have entered graduate school, possibly as a teaching assistant, in the fall of 2004. Such is my story. In eighth grade, my class had the precarious honor of being named the “Smoke-Free Class of 2000,” a designation that entailed looking at pieces of smokers’ lungs and taking countless surveys about peer pressure. When I graduated from high school, we took even more surveys; as the first class of the new millennium, high hopes, sociological studies, and feature news stories were pinned on us. Although I recall some newspaper articles about the class of 2000 entering college, the media coverage seemed to have subsided by the time I graduated. And when I entered graduate school in rhetoric and composition in the fall of 2004, at the age of twenty-two, no one was asking me for interviews. The academic literature about my generation, however, is burgeoning. Books on “the millennial student” have become part of many college counselors’ libraries, and student services journals are steadily publishing articles on how to best serve millennial students and their parents.

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