As a college English teacher heading into the semester, I want to talk about the challenges we’re facing right now. For context, my own children are 18 (starting college) and 16 (high school sophomore), so I’m intimately familiar with this.
I’d argue that the current group of college students are facing three distinct challenges (interlinked in their effects) that people like me didn’t have to deal with when we were in college:
a) PANDEMIC: the pandemic was a global disaster (one of my students lost four family members in March 2020) and a massive disruption to their education. As a teacher, I wasn’t particularly worried about them missing some content in that time, and I’m still not — you can catch up on content. But a significant percentage of them also never integrated some of the study habits and approaches to learning that you’d normally start learning in middle school / early high school, and that’s been dogging them ever since.
b) SOCIAL MEDIA: the rise of social media has affected all of us, I think. I used to say that it’s fragmented our attention, programming us to only be able to consume in short bursts. I’m not sure that’s actually true — I’d want to check research to know for sure if it’s actually affecting our brains.
But I do think it’s created a society where we’re now used to getting lots of little dopamine hits from things like TikToks and FB reels, and that makes it harder to convince ourselves to engage with things that are going to require a little more effort on our part, even things we expect to enjoy, like good novels. (Or a walk in the park! It’s easier to stay on the couch scrolling.)
Many of my students (even the very bright ones), and my friends, struggle to focus enough to read an entire novel, and I’m pretty sure that’s much more true than it was thirty years ago.
c) GENERATIVE AI: the way generative AI has been rapidly normalized (and pushed at us hard) is making students ask the question: “Why should I do this work when AI does it better?”
(I know some of you don’t think AI does it better — please set that aside for the moment, as the important point here is: many of my students believe it does. For the sake of argument, let’s say AI does do it better — I still think my students should do the work themselves, because writing the bad essay is how you learn to write the good essay; it’s how you learn to think.)
All those things together, I think, are creating an environment where students are asking why they should do what feels like make-work to them.
So where I am right now is that I think before I can teach them about literature, or about essay-writing, I pretty much have to spend some time and energy this semester convincing them that they actually want to learn, even though learning is often hard work, without immediate rewards or dopamine hits.
I think I’m going to start class today with the question —
“Would you put your Fitbit on a robot and have it walk around for you?”
Let’s see where we go from there.
