Why Gen Z can’t do science

I remember as a college freshman seeing a cartoon taped on the door of one of the physics labs in Cornelia Hall at Iona College. It showed a student complaining to his professor, saying, “I really understand the material, I just can’t do the problems.”

It’s not rocket science to understand why GenZers are struggling to do science. It’s as simple as a No. 2 pencil and a pile of scrap paper — two old-school learning tools that are anathema to the young people now in my chemistry classroom who were born into the Age of the Screen.

In an article from Second Wave Learning, “Has Gen Z Lost Critical Thinking Skills?” the author asks us to imagine we are 21 years old and we’ve always had an app that can tell us the weather, help park the car, discover music we’ve never heard but might like, count our steps or beep when it’s time to meditate. … “Research suggests that this onslaught of technology is rewiring the brains of Gen Z.”

And making matters worse, COVID reinforced this phenomenon among many first- and second-year college students who spent much of their junior and senior years in high school staring at screens while attempting to do science virtually.

One cannot learn science by osmosis. Magic happens when the brain, eyes and hand all come together in beautiful synaptic choreography, guiding a pencil across a sheet of paper.

Being blessed with a vivid memory and humorous storytelling skills, I manage to share with every class the time I was in a Friday night bowling league with my mother. Between frames, I scurried back to my seat to balance a page of very difficult chemical reactions my college general chemistry professor had assigned over a weekend. No one is capable of mastering these equations by staring at them.

And now, when I teach this topic to my general chemistry students, I still have to review the process with, yes, a No. 2 pencil and scrap paper.

This past semester, I had the lowest grades I have ever recorded in an introductory general chemistry course — five Fs, three Ds, a bunch of Cs, a few Bs and only one A. And this was after I had advised several students earlier in the semester to drop the course and take a W because clearly, they weren’t going to survive.

I’m sure they’re sick of me reminding them when I went to college last century — which always gets a laugh since they think I am exaggerating (I’m not) — we had no internet. There were no laptops and, of course, no smartphones. Handheld calculators had just been invented and they cost a small fortune. If we needed to look up a physical constant, we had the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, a tome that required two hands and a healthy back to lift.

And we had lots of No. 2 pencils and scrap paper — and we were all the better for it.