Shortly after I shared an Atlantic story about Gen Z's increasingly elaborate theme parties in Whiteboard's Slack, one of my Gen Z colleagues replied: "Feeling a little called out by this article—threw a Christmas party in May and did make a Partiful invite."

The Christmas party was relatively restrained.

Victoria Feng reports on young adults gathering to deliver PowerPoint presentations about historically bad decisions, competing in a spelling-bee birthday party, running more than 65 laps around a cul-de-sac, and mourning Spirit Airlines. One D.C.-area couple has hosted a bad-movie night, an "embracing your cringe" party, and an evening where every guest prepared an eight-to-10-minute presentation. The winner presented on dueling.

These are easy to dismiss as ordinary socializing repackaged for Partiful and Instagram. The part worth noticing is how much work people volunteer to do.

Young people have not lost their willingness to prepare, perform, collaborate, or risk looking ridiculous in front of other people. They do those things when the invitation is specific, when the rules create something shared, and when showing up feels worth the effort.

Schools are chasing the same qualities with less traction. Writing in The 74, Terra Greenwell, the former chief academic officer in Jefferson County, argues that districts adopting Portrait of a Graduate frameworks are good at naming what they want, emotional intelligence and adaptability and collaboration and resilience, and bad at building anything that tracks whether students get there. She puts the failure plainly: 160 schools deliver 160 different experiences.

A summer internship program in New Mexico shows what it looks like when the experience is the point. The New Mexico Summer Enrichment Program, now run with the national nonprofit Education at Work under former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift, drew more than 5,000 applicants and placed 2,200 students in eight-week paid internships. Edith Segura, 17, of Roswell wanted a career in medicine and landed at a women's health clinic, where she shadowed doctors, recorded vitals, and practiced an ultrasound on a visiting technician. Students also worked in teams on community projects. One Roswell group pitched a student-discount directory to 20 local businesses and 18 said they were interested.

Somebody has to be worth showing up for. Bill Waychunas, a Bradley University professor who spent a decade teaching secondary social studies, writes in Education Week that students start sizing up a teacher on day one. He cites John Hattie's finding that teacher credibility predicts student learning more strongly than student effort, motivation, or socioeconomic status. What builds it is unglamorous. Follow through on what you say. Learn every student's name by the end of the first week. Return work fast enough that students can tell you read it. Lose credibility in September, Waychunas says, and it is nearly impossible to win back.

There is a cost to watching instead. Seven experiments out of Binghamton University, published this month in Memory & Cognition, found that recognition for screenshotted images fell below 60 percent, against the roughly 87 percent accuracy people show for images they simply looked at. Saving an experience is not the same as processing it.

Segura went into her internship planning to become an X-ray technician. She fainted after watching one procedure and felt queasy at another the next day, and she came out having ruled the path out.

No test would have told her that.

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