Seventy years ago this January, I walked into my first class, at elementary school, and had my first experience interacting with a teacher.  Next month, I will greet students walking into my class, experiencing my first day teaching a class of my own.  

      A lot has happened between those two days.

      Next month marks a memorable milestone for me. I will, for the first time, formally take on the title of “professor” and jump into a semester of teaching a graduate school class focusing on urban development. It’s a topic I have had directly in front of me for my entire career, as a practitioner.

But now I’ll be dealing with it in a teaching mode. …

      So, the question is: “What was your worst job ever?”  Certainly, it’s a subject that triggers memories, reflections and musings, but what if you don’t really have a worst job ever?

      I’d guess that my first job was when I was about eight years old, assigned to clean up my room. There certainly were some things about that job that I didn’t like, including picking up toys and clothes and putting them away, and prohibiting me from going in to the TV room, resulting in my missing some of my favorite cartoons.  (No option to record a program in 1958.) 

      But there were also benefits, including learning shortcuts to cleaning up a room that avoided the tedious organizational norms. I’d say the benefits outweighed the disadvantages.

      Then, a few years later, I was assigned the job of being a patrol boy, wearing a patrol belt and helping little kids cross a street at a designated corner. …

    We know so much. About most everything. We are proud of our knowledge and experience, delighted to pass along what we know to younger generations, and puzzled when we get responses like: “Yeah, OK.”

    So, today’s topic focuses on what we need to know and understand about Generation Z. These are folks who were born between 1997 and 2012, age range today of roughly 12 to 27.

    Look up “Gen Z” and you’ll find a treasure trove of information about this age group that we know and love, but about which we actually understand very little.

    These are our grandchildren. These are junior-high and high school students and athletes whom we watch playing sports and playing music, occasionally reading, excessively online, trying to find the right mix of entertainment and achievement. . . .

Because of back beat, our generation lived through one of the most consequential evolutions in popular music, a change that profoundly affected and reflected our view of the world.

What Is Back Beat?

Quick definition: “back beat” is a musical term that establishes a particular structure for a song.

Think about the structure of measures in songs: Four beats to a measure: 1-2-3-4.

In the music of our parents’ generations and before, the emphasis in a song would be on notes 1 and 3. 1-2-3-4.

Question: How many Boomers does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer: Four.  (One to change the bulb, and three to talk about how good the old one was.) 

Young people often marvel at the path we’ve travelled.

They could not conceive, for instance, of party lines. I grew up in a Chicago suburb, about three blocks from the Chicago city limits. This was the 1950s. We had a telephone, of course, but it was on a shared “party line” with a family down the street.

Which meant that if we wanted to make a call, we’d pick up the receiver and either get a dial tone or hear the conversation that our neighbor was having with someone…..