- In a viral video on TikTok, a teacher says that in class, a student accidentally called her Alexa (like Amazon’s assistant)
- She’s Used to “Mom,” But She Wasn’t Ready for “Alexa”
- This is the sign that she is teaching a new generation: the Alpha generation.
At school, it happens that to call the teacher, a student uses the wrong name. On her TikTok channel, Msaprilwu, an educator (in primary school), says that students often accidentally call her “mom”. On the other hand, she was not ready for “Alexa”.
“Today I was called by a name that I have never been called before”, she says. A student accidentally called it Alexa, like the digital assistant you call when you want to ask a question to Amazon’s connected speakers. It was a first for her and now I wouldn’t be surprised if another student accidentally called her Google.
Already seen more than 1.3 million times on TikTok, the video has generated quite a few reactions. And obviously, with the new generation, this will be frequent, because it has grown up with connected speakers. A surfer comments, for example, that her daughter’s first word was “Google”, because there was a speaker in her room. And Msaprilwu responded to this one by explaining that it was also part of the first words of one of his children.
@msaprilwu That was a first @amazon #alexa #amazonalexa #genalpha #teacher #teachersoftiktok #teacherlife #kidssaythefunniestthings ♬ original sound – Bilingual 👩🏻🏫, MA in BL Ed
Alexa, is this really a surprise?
Many people are also worried about what this educator said. For her part, she explains in the video that this is a sign that she is teaching a new generation: the one called Generation Alpha. This succeeds Generation Z and includes children born between the early 2010s and the mid-2020s.
It is called the Alpha generation, like the first letter of the Greek alphabet, because it is the very first generation “to be born entirely in the 21st century and the third millennium”, according to Wikipedia (part of Generation Z was born in the 90s). In any case, the childhood of this Alpha generation is very marked by the use of new technologies, including connected speakers, as well as social networks and streaming services.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that even among adults (millenials), it happens that we make this kind of blunder. In the comments of the video, people admit that they have already accidentally called family members or colleagues “Siri”.
And moreover, the fact that a student uses the wrong name at school is normal. In the comments, a person says, for example, that in kindergarten, she accidentally called her teacher “Elmo” (a cartoon character). Otherwise, another commenter writes that later the children might also accidentally call the teacher “ChatGPT”.
