Kein Bock, yo

This week I was pleasured, er... tortured, by the company of 6 German 15 year-olds whose well-meaning but clueless parents had decided to sign them up for a week-long intensive English course. For 4 hours a day, I was supposed to entertain, educate, and enlighten these students who made it clear to me that they did want to spend Spring Break learning about suffixes, prefixes, or if clauses.

After day 1, I made the mistake of thinking that I could be cool and get the kids to like me. Horrible. Teenagers can smell desperation. I just embarrassed myself by teaching requests/demands with "cool" teaching tools like lyrics to "Keep the Car Running." It was pathetic, and afterwards the students rewarded me for my efforts my clicking their pens in unison until I had to yell at them to stop.

Up until the middle of the week, I thought I was just dealing with the universal apathy that coats many young teens, turning into the glassy-eyed mumblers so evoked in any sort of general griping about kids these days. But no, I was dealing with something else, what the German media has christened the Kein Bock generation. Just as Americans like to saddle every generation with some sociological title (I'm a Millennial, I think...) the Germans have labeled the current 14-20 years old as the generation without lust, passion, ambition, or interests. In other words, they have no mojo, which is what the slangy phrase Bock stands for.

I don't want to buy this because I think it's a little unoriginal; anyone who's every listened to the Beach Boys knows that teens have wanted to be left alone in their rooms to do nothing since time immemorial. But I have to admit that my batch of German teens seemed deeply disconnected. According to their answers to my unscientific inquiries, they have no interests in cars, music, romance, family, religion, sport, university, or money. They even declared MySpace and Facebook as being "done," and "over."

On Friday I gave up on being cool and just let them play Hangman for the last half-hour of class, and they lit up. Who cares about social networking, partying, studying, or playing in a rock band? All these Germans needed to get their Bock up was a piece of chalk and a stick figure, hanging dead on the board, over the word "annoying."