Help! I teach gifted students!

I’m a Gen Xer. My class of high school seniors are Gen Z. My students are the pride of their nation. They are in a boarding school for gifted students. I have the responsibility of teaching Academic English to 24 super-smart, competitive, STEM?students. At their age, the best that could be said about me was that I was “reliable and conscientious”. Now as a professional educator, with more than 25 years in the field of education and training, I find uncertainty digging into my confidence and experience. I’ve taught clever students before, but never a whole class of high achievers. This aspect of my teaching is still a work in progress.?

Use your words

A characteristic of Gen Z in general is that they have been told that college or university is non-negotiable. All my students are college bound. While most of them have picked their tertiary institution, a few would like a break from academia. However, they can’t stand up to the pressure of parents, teachers and even their peers, so they go through the process of applying on the Common App. Success, they have been told, is the end result of a good education that will give you a great job, a great salary and a life of affluence. They might be scoring A's in physics and biochemistry, but they are not sure if medicine or engineering is what they want for themselves. There isn’t much time in their packed schedules to explore creative writing or art. I’m not about to contest their parents’ influence, the school’s recommendation and societal expectations, so I create spaces for them to express their interests. I invite my students to do performance poetry. Even the shy ones want to stand up and do their version of a 3-minute slam poem. I encourage them to have a go at writing their own, in the fashion of Alex Dang's "What kind of Asian are you?" In their essays, I invite them to write about being uncertain about what to do after high school. The best I can do as a teacher for students who face pressures bigger than themselves, bigger than myself, is to say, "I see you, I hear you."