If you’re a history buff, you may already know that Cleopatra had a substantial amount of rizz. King Henry VIII, on the other hand, could be considered the Tom Sandoval of his time. Meanwhile, Czar Nicholas II struggled to, well, pick a struggle.

History teacher Lauren Cella's "Gen Z Teaches History" series has earned about 30 million views on Instagram and TikTok combined.

All three of these historic royals have been the subject of “Gen Z Teaches History,” a viral video series created by Lauren Cella, who teaches 10th grade history. In it, the California educator assumes the persona of a Gen Z teacher from the future, delivering overviews of historical figures and events using a hilarious mix of opaque (if you’re a Millennial or older) slang and Taylor Swift lyrics.

“A positive compliment that I hear sometimes from my students or from people on the internet is like, ‘Oh my goodness, you make history so interesting,’” Cella explains. “And I always say, ‘History is interesting.’ I think other people make it boring. I'm not making it interesting. I'm just telling you what happened.”

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Check out our Gen Z slang dictionary below.

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What began on a lark on social media has earned Cella millions of views across TikTok and Instagram, along with the admiration of students and commenters who appreciate how much they learn from each installment.

I’ve had teachers of different ages that were able to break it down in a way that we could understand, and that made me fall in love with history. So the series is really just an homage to that.

— Lauren Cella

“Thank you for helping me get my PhD in 20th century history,” wrote a commenter about Cella’s explanation of the Cold War.

Behind the lighthearted series is Cella’s real love of history and desire to make it more accessible, just as her own teachers did for her.

“I think other people make it inaccessible,” she says. “I think other people purposely want to not tell different sides of the story, they want it to be an easier narrative, they purposely use vocabulary that only encompasses upper academia. They don't want other types of people to be able to have access to the curriculum, and that's done on purpose — especially in social studies.”

How It Started

Cella loves a good story.

It's why she studied history and journalism as an undergrad, and why teaching history appeals to her. Before that, Cella grew up hearing stories from her paternal Hawaiian grandparents — who are also of Chinese and Puerto Rican heritage, which Cella says is a common “hapa” mix of backgrounds — about their lives and the family’s history. They shared stories about what they witnessed during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and they also regaled her with the history of Puerto Rico’s indigenous Taino people.

“Then on my mom's side of the family, all the elders would tell stories about how the family came from Mexico,” Cella recalls. “From a really young age, I was really interested in Liberty's Kids and the American Girl series. I should have known I was going to be a history teacher.”

It’s a lack of connection to the past that Cella sees as a barrier to students finding their own love for history.

“A lot of these things were 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and maybe if you're reading about it from a primary source, it can be really difficult to understand,” Cella explains. “I’ve had teachers of different ages that were able to break it down in a way that we could understand, and that made me fall in love with history. So the series is really just an homage to that.”

It was Cella’s students who encouraged her to start posting history lessons online, and she finally gave it a try during the pandemic.

“I was like, ‘No, I'm too old. Nobody does that,’” Cella recalls thinking about the notion of taking to social media to teach lessons. “And they're like, ‘No, Miss, they do. You can actually learn a lot of stuff. People go on it to learn.’ So I started kind of posting more and just experimenting, and I noticed that my stories about teaching or my reels about history were getting a lot more engagement than anything else I was posting.”

Her first viral hit was a Gen Z history lesson on the Russian Revolution, which gained 1 million views on Instagram and then another million views on TikTok. Cella says that she chalked it up to luck, but then her next video on the French Revolution reached 2 million views. Subsequent history videos continued to perform well.

Most of her online audience is made up of people her age or older, Cella says. While they might not understand all of the slang, she muses, they’re drawn in by the format and pleasantly surprised to end the videos knowing more than when they started.

“Literally have never understood WW1 until right now,” a commenter wrote on her most popular TikTok video to date.

Cella likes to “trick” people into learning when they think they’re just watching a funny social media post.

“Of course, it's an oversimplification. The videos are a minute long, but it gets people interested,” she says. “I'm really just doing the same thing on TikTok and reels that every great teacher does, and that's just connecting with their students and breaking it down into a language that they could understand in a way that is inclusive and maybe a little bit fun.”

Fun can be hard to come by for teachers these days. Cella hopes that her videos offer an example to fellow educators about how, despite the difficulties of the profession, they need not always let worry dominate.

“If you're worried that you're not doing enough, you probably are. Because the good teachers that I know are always trying to do the best for our students,” she says. “So if that's where your heart is, 99 percent of the time, you're probably already doing enough.”

Behind the Scenes

There are a few recurring elements to Cella’s Gen Z history videos: She’s sitting behind a desk or podium, sunglasses perched atop her head, iced coffee in hand.

Cella says she never intended for the iced coffee in particular to become a staple of the format, but there’s no going back now. That’s because it signals a pivotal moment in her videos, when she shakes the ice-filled cup, switches hands, and introduces important context for the story with a pointed, “Meanwhile…”

“This is so embarrassing, but sometimes it takes me a few takes and the ice would melt, and then I would have water. And I'm like, ‘What do you do?’” she recounts. “I would go buy another one, but then I was all hyped up on coffee. So I have fake ice in the iced coffee now.”

Cella is a student of her time. As a high schooler, she was a fan of comedy history shows like Drunk History and Epic Rap Battles of History — series that approached dry subject matter with a comedic slant that earned them wide appeal.

But her influences now include her students, who give her ideas for new slang to incorporate and keep her up-to-date on the ever-evolving Gen Z — and now Gen Alpha — lexicon.

It was her students' frank way of speaking about the world that inspired the character Cella plays. Cella says that if she’s making fun of anyone, it’s herself and not the kids.

“The way we were taught [history] was so boring and so dry and only told one side of the story, and Gen Z is not about that,” Cella says. “So when they actually get to be the history teachers, that was the inspiration. They're going to really give us the tea, they're really going to tell us how it is.”

The college students who give campus tours for the admissions office may sound like confident ambassadors, but they sometimes have their own doubts about whether they’ve made the right college choice or are on the right life path.

That dramatic tension drives an independent mockumentary called “Admitted,” created by a group of undergraduates at Boston University.

The five-episode web series, whose final episode is scheduled to appear later this month, involved the work of more than 20 students, some crowdfunding and the use of free studio space on the campus. And it ends up making some timely observations about college admissions, and about student life after the pandemic — when students sometimes struggle to make social connections after high school experiences spent on lockdown. It’s set at the fictional Beacon Hill University — not to be confused with a nearby rival college in the world of the series, The University of Beacon Hill.

One student leading and acting in the production’s ensemble cast, Maggie Borgen, has spent plenty of time thinking through issues of college choice. When she was a high school senior in New Jersey during the pandemic, she made a podcast designed to give advice to other students going through the college admissions process during the health crisis, which limited campus tours and many of the usual rituals of high school. (EdSurge talked to her about that project at the time.)

Since starting as a student at BU, she ended up working at the admissions office there leading information sessions. And she thought it would make a great setting for a sitcom in the style of her favorite comedies, including “Parks and Recreation” and “Abbott Elementary.”

“A college admissions office seemed like a really good way to explore coming of age in college through a workplace setting, but also in a way that is relatable to a general audience, because most Americans are thinking about college in some sense because it's just such a big part of the zeitgeist,” Borgen says.

She was excited to try to examine that setting from the perspective of students today, during this unusual time.The high cost of college these days provides plenty of material for satire. In one scene, Borgen’s character, MC, is giving a campus tour and describing the new 10-story engineering building with a food court and gleaming library. She tells the students, “I figure if you’re going to go into student debt, you might as well go bankrupt for Beacon.”

The students started production last fall, meeting two or three times a week to write and film the series. It’s starting to get some recognition — it was recently named as a finalist in the Houston Comedy Film Festival.

EdSurge recently connected with Borgen to ask what insights she’s gleaned in making the show, and how students continue to struggle with the lingering impact of COVID-19.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page.

© Image courtesy of "Admitted"

As college classes start up this fall, instructors are handing out syllabi and pointing students to official platforms for turning in assignments and participating in class discussions. Meanwhile students are setting up unofficial online channels of their own, where they can ask questions of classmates, gripe about the professor and sometimes share homework and test answers.

Students increasingly turn to private systems to create online groups around individual college classes. It’s a practice that has gone on for years, but teaching experts say it intensified during pandemic campus shut-downs, when students were looking for ways to connect. Platforms used for these groups include Discord, a discussion service popular with video gamers; GroupMe, a text-message platform; and Slack, the messaging system popular in many professional workplaces.

“We tell faculty to assume that there is a Discord for all of their courses,” says Aaron Zachmeier, associate director for instructional design and development at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Some professors welcome these channels as a way for students to blow off steam. But others worry that they can lead to violations of academic integrity. And some have taken the attitude of, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” actively setting up Discord servers or joining those created by their students.

"We tell faculty to assume that there is a Discord for all of their courses.”

— Aaron Zachmeier, associate director for instructional design and development at the University of California at Santa Cruz

In some ways it’s just an online version of informal networking that students have always done as they chat with classmates in physical classrooms before or after class. But because these online platforms are easy to hide from instructors and are available 24/7, they can be trickier for students and professors to navigate.

Building Community

Most college courses these days offer official online forums where students in a class can chat, often through learning management systems. But students can be reluctant to use these sanctioned channels, or to show up in person for office hours, says Megan McNamara, a continuing lecturer in sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

She says she used a Discord server as a student recently, in an online course she took at the campus. “I loved it,” she says, noting that the students got to know each other by asking questions like what they planned to do next year. “What gave me my feeling of being in relationship with anyone else in the class was the conversations I had there.”

Often students use pseudonyms in the platforms, so that even if they do run into each other on campus, they might not realize it. But McNamara says she ended up getting together with another classmate she met on the Discord group face to face.

Zachmeier, the instructional design director, says that students often use student-organized discussion groups on Discord or other channels to ask each other logistical questions about the class and assignments that they are too embarrassed to ask the professor, or to get an answer more quickly than a professor might respond.

That’s what Joseph Ching, an affiliate scholar at James Madison University, has experienced. He says he has noticed that students typically organize channels in Discord and GroupMe only when they are frustrated by the level of assistance or timely feedback from instructors. When he was an undergraduate at Purdue University a couple of years ago during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he says that students flocked to GroupMe to talk about topics like “I need help on my homework,” or “how do I drop this class?”

McNamara adds that students report feeling more social anxiety these days than before the pandemic, and many seem more comfortable asking questions of classmates online than in person. “They could talk to each other, but that doesn’t mean they do,” she says. And these days, in the time before class sessions start, she sees students “pull out their phones to avoid talking to people.”

But even though these forums can build community, they might also be playing a role in reducing attendance in classes and contributing to a sense of student disengagement in physical lectures. When EdSurge visited Texas State University to explore that issue late last year, Zoe Channon, then a senior majoring in biology, said, “I almost wonder if technology is sort of encouraging people to not go to class, where then people are sort of checking in with other students and on GroupMe to find out, ‘What did they ask about this?’”

And these platforms have also been the sites of student bullying. McNamara and Zachmeier noted in an advice column on the use of Discord that students are expected to follow the college or university’s code of conduct “regardless of where those interactions take place.”

Concerns About Cheating

The biggest concern many professors have about these unofficial online platforms is whether students use them to cheat, both Zachmeier and McNamara acknowledge, by sharing answers on homework or exams.

While the loudest discussions about student cheating these days revolve around the use of new AI tools like ChatGPT, student Discord servers and other unofficial online forums can allow students to trade specific answers or work together in ways that might be even harder to catch.

A few incidents of student cheating on these online platforms have made headlines in recent years. In 2019, for instance, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin sent an email to 70 students saying he would give them an F on an assignment and refer them to the dean’s office after he discovered they were on a GroupMe chat group where answers to an exam were shared.

That has prompted advice to pop up in at least one Reddit channel advising students to avoid joining GroupMe sections for their classes. As the anonymous user wrote: “If you are looking to cheat, then this is honestly the worst way to do it. With everything online there's much better ways to get answers without leaving a huge trail and risking other people's academic records, and to be honest [it’s] probably more work to cheat than it is to just do the classwork (and you might learn something).”

That rings true for Perry Evans, a senior at James Madison University. He said that there was a “big scare” among many of his classmates last year about using GroupMe, out of concern that the companies would share information from the chats with professors.

Though Evans uses Discord for video gaming, including discussing Pokemon Go, he says he does not use it or other unofficial platforms in his classes, where he feels he gets enough feedback and help from professors and teaching assistants if needed.

Meanwhile, concerns about student cheating have led some professors to try to get involved with student Discord servers for their classes, or set them up, so they can monitor them.

But that has led to pushback from students who say that defeats the purpose.

“Discord is for students, not professors,” wrote Tony Phan Vo, a student at California State University at Fullerton, in an article last fall in the student newspaper there. “Students should be in charge of their class Discord servers, not the professors,” he continued. “Collaboration becomes futile when there is pressure to follow cautious procedures, especially if the Discord doesn’t have a clear instruction by the professor.”

If a professor does become part of a student Discord server, McNamara, of UC Santa Cruz, advises setting clear expectations and sticking with them — especially around whether or how quickly you will respond to student questions.

“If you set yourself up to be responsive and you aren’t responsive, it’s worse than if you didn’t say you’d use it,” she says.

And she advises professors to resist the temptation to get involved with these informal channels at all. “The undergroundness of Discord is part of its appeal,” she notes. For students, she adds, “this is how you develop independence.”

© Julia Tim / Shutterstock

There are likely droves of educators who find themselves wishing they could take a peek inside their students’ minds to find out, “What the heck are you thinking?”

Some of those answers were made available last month when the Boys & Girls Clubs of America released its annual survey of kids and teens ages 9 to 18. The organization says that more than 130,000 young people at nearly 3,500 clubs around the country took part in the survey.

While there are generally some limitations when it comes to asking people to rate their own strengths and weaknesses — i.e. the temptation to pick the “right” answer — the survey reveals how kids view themselves and their desires for the future. They were asked to agree or disagree with statements about college and career plans, how they’re faring in school and with their mental health, among other topics.

Life After High School

Educators, employers, policymakers and others have been fretting over enrollment declines at colleges and whether students see the same value in a university diploma as their predecessors. In one recent example, thousands of high school students received a community college admission letter without ever applying in a bid by the State University of New York to attract potential freshmen.

Among the Boys & Girls Clubs of America kids, survey participants overwhelmingly had college aspirations, with 75 percent expecting to continue their education beyond high school.

Thirty percent said they want a bachelor’s degree, and another 26 percent plan to pursue a master’s or other advanced degrees. Amongst the high school seniors, most reported having applied to trade school, community college or a university along with federal financial aid.

The survey also took measure of kids’ interests in science, technology, education and math. Students by and large said they were excited by and successful in math and science, with 47 percent of reporting they agreed or strongly agreed they wanted a STEM career and 52 percent saying they know the “steps a student needs to take if they want to be in a science-related career.”

They also appear to be confident in their knowledge of how to reach their career goals and the accompanying price tag. Among high school juniors and seniors, more than 90 percent said they know what kind of education or vocational training they will need for the jobs they want and how much those plans will cost.

It’s an impressive stat considering the well-documented stressors that grads older than these youngsters who are yoked with student loan debt are facing, like worries about repayment or buying homes.

Despite the positive outlook, only 51 percent of participants in fifth through 12th grade said they were on track to graduate. Twenty-one percent said they were “on track with some risk,” while the remaining 28 percent said they were not on track to graduate from high school.

Are the Kids Alright?

It’s undoubtedly been a stressful few years for kids, and they’re still in the midst of what experts called a national youth mental health crisis. Schools and community groups alike are trying to figure out how to meet the demand for more mental health support among students, and crisis lines have reported an uptick in teens reaching out for help.

But the survey participants generally saw themselves as mentally strong.

About a two-thirds of the kids said it was either “very true” or “sort of true” that they can stay calm when stressed, and nearly half said they know how to calm themselves down.

Around 60 percent of students said it was “very true” that they can identify the emotions they feel and how their feelings influence their actions. Sixty-four percent believe it’s “very true” that they can accomplish most things if they try their best, and about the same amount said they don’t give up on something when they have trouble with a task.

They were also positive when it came to making mistakes. Just over 90 percent said it was either “very true” or “sort of true” that they try to figure out how to do better next time when something important in their lives goes wrong.

However, their responses revealed something more concerning when statements were phrased more negatively.

Forty percent said it was “very true” — and 30 percent said it was “sort of true” — that, “when something goes wrong in my life, I just can’t stop worrying about it.”

Another 38 percent said it was “very true” — 29 percent said it was “sort of true” — that they try to keep people from finding out when something goes wrong in their life.

Cool to Be Kind

Kids reported a fairly sunny outlook on their relationships and communities, responding positively to questions about how they treat others and their feelings about their community.

More than 90 percent said they try to help when they see someone in need or help when “I see someone having a problem.” Another 85 percent said they try to think about how others will be impacted by their decisions, and about the same percentage said they are good at making friends.

More than 80 percent of kids say they believe they can make a difference in their communities.

But on the receiving end of others’ behavior, 40 percent of kids said they had been bullied at school during the past year (62 percent of those students also said they told an adult). Another 18 percent said they had been “electronically bullied,” and those kids were less likely to tell an adult — 45 percent said they did.

© Alphavector / Shutterstock