After a short introduction, Ushanda Pauling orders her class of 14 men and women, ages 28 to 60, to take out their cellphones.
Two of them shrug — they don't own cellphones.
Already, five minutes into Pauling's "Youth Culture, Music, Movies, and Adultism" workshop, these social workers, counselors, teachers and nonprofit volunteers have been confronted with a generation gap. (Luckily, Pauling brought extra cellphones.)
She then asks the class to find their personal ring tones on the phones and play them for the group.
"Oh no," complains one teacher. "My 13-year-old is not with me. I can't do this."
Pauling tries another activity: a pop culture trivia game. She points to the sheets of orange paper taped to the walls of the Juvenile Welfare Board conference room. Each sheet is printed with answers to questions about TV shows and text-messaging abbreviations. She'll read the question, and anyone who knows the answer must slap the piece of paper that has the correct response. Those who don't know the answer go to the back of the room and stand by the sign saying, "I have no clue."
Pauling begins with questions like "Where is the latest Real World being filmed now?" and "Who is the host of the show Dances From Da Hood?"
Many of the adults stand sheepishly under the "I have no clue" sign for the entire game. If these men and women thought they knew something about youth culture, this game has brought them back to reality.
But Pauling, 31, isn't performing the exercises to make the group feel unhip. In a slightly subversive way, she's trying to make a point.
Her lesson today is "adultism."
Pauling takes out a large pad and uncaps a marker.
"What words describe youth today?" she asks and scribbles the answers furiously.
"Crazy," calls out a counselor with the Pinellas County Health Department.
"Risk-takers."
"Cocky."
"Confused."
"Afraid."
"Lazy."
"Computer-savvy."
"Arrogant."
"Fearless."
More than half the words are negative. And these individuals all work in agencies dealing with troubled or at-risk kids.
"When we have adults with this kind of adultism," says Pauling, "we have young people who learn some very concrete things from that mindset. Some of the toxicity we see in youth culture is being fed to them directly from adults. It becomes this crazy little cycle."
According to the Child Welfare League of America, "adultism occurs when adults have both a negative view of young people and the ability to exert control over the lives of youth."
Pauling says in the eight years she has worked with kids through her position as YMCA's associate director for youth development, she has consistently noticed a "disconnect" between children and adults. This detachment, she says, can manifest itself through an attitude of superiority over youth to the simple act of solving kids' problems, assuming they are not capable of helping themselves.
Pauling splits the class into groups of three and asks them to remember what was important to them when they were teenagers. The responses center on music, sports, the opposite sex, clothes, family and TV. But when Pauling asks what is important to youth today, they call out "technology" and "drugs."
Pauling nods.
"Let's look at this," she says to the class, several of whom grew up in the freewheeling '70s. "Technology was not as advanced then, but did we utilize it as teens? I'm guessing drugs and alcohol were a big part of some our lives in these days, too."
There are murmurs of assent.
"Really, not much has changed for young people since I was a teen or you were a teen," she says. "At the core of it, not really a whole lot of difference there."
But Bryony Chamberlain says understanding the millennial generation can be difficult. And Chamberlain, who works for YMCA's Workforce Empowerment, is only 28.
"What they are trying out when they're 14 or 15 is so much different than when I was 14 or 15," she says. "Teens today are more developed, physically and mentally."
Kim Miller from Devereux, Fla., pipes in: "You turn on any TV show now, and there's so much more aggression. Whatever happened to The Cosby Show? Nobody would watch a show like that now."
And don't even bring up rap music. Erma Boeteng from the nonprofit Big Brothers Big Sisters says her 14-year-old "little sister" consistently challenges Boeteng's knowledge of youth culture.
"When we're riding or going to an event, she changes the radio to something like Wild 98.7," the 47-year-old says. "She says I'm old-fashioned because I don't know what they're saying."
As her final presentation, Pauling plays a track from Asia, a popular spoken-word artist. "Breathe" is laced with profanity but touches on subjects ranging from road rage to watching a loved one die of cancer. When the piece finishes, the adults praise it. Pauling tells them the artist was 17 when he wrote the piece.
As the class packs up, social worker Maria Ortiz says she'll use what she's learned not only for the at-risk youth she deals with, but her own children.
"We need to know how to talk to our kids," Ortiz says. "Sometimes we can teach them, but sometimes they teach us, too."
This article appears in Nov 7-13, 2007.