A few weeks ago, a batch of email dispatches from college faculty and staff was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Focused on student “disengagement” and burnout, it went viral, at least with academics on Twitter. The landscape those emails mapped out was terrible: Everyone was seeing mass student anxiety, anhedonia, and underperformance, to the point that it was hard to accomplish the basic pedagogical mission. Undergraduates were battered and fried this semester, even worse than in Fall 2021, when many schools returned to in-person classes. At least then we had adrenaline sustaining us.
One adviser’s remarks capture the general vibe:
I have never had so many students that have gone into academic suspension or dropped courses a couple of weeks into the semester. Some students just disappear and end up failing their classes. I try and reach out to them to see how they are doing personally as well as academically, and many have said they are struggling emotionally and mentally. It is heartbreaking. Before I might see one or two out of 30 having issues; now it is probably half of the students.
Impossible to blame them. They aren’t stupid, they aren’t insensitive. As another correspondent put it, “They say it feels as if the world is falling apart and everything is out of control.” Is that incorrect? I feel that way!
Every crisis in a society will disfigure its schools. That is happening now. There is no “ivory tower,” and Academia, whatever that means, is wide open to the rest of the vicious world. Try as campus planners might to build up walled green zones, even lavishly funded colleges are tangled with outer forces.
I can’t claim to have had some epiphany or formed perfect conclusions about this semester or the 2021-22 year. I only have scattered notes, which will maybe become something more elaborate eventually.
Especially after Spring Break, more students than usual missed class, or came in late, or flaked on scheduled conferences, or took days to reply to emails.
One course section shrank by 20 percent, because of official withdrawals and simple disappearances. That’s atypical attrition.
I talk to my students a lot, both in class (which is discussion-based) and one-on-one during conferences. Whenever I asked how things were going this term, they described pervasive burnout and anxiety in themselves and their friends and roommates—all the stuff that Chronicle dispatch covered. It was a second pandemic. And I’m sure my course is part of that distress, though they’re too polite (and savvy) to mention this, and only complain about other classes.
My courses at USC use a “grading contract.” Basically this means that students write several papers (and get feedback) without any grades, before submitting a final portfolio comprising revised work, which does earn a letter grade, because my institution insists on that. Contract systems are not true “ungrading,” and they do not eliminate grade anxiety, but they do reduce it somewhat by displacing it to the semester’s end, when (theoretically) a student is doing their strongest (and, again, revised) work. As always, I wish my writing classes were simply Pass / No Pass.
The work of teaching often feels like a failure, even when, by all your best professional judgement, a class session went well, or the evaluations from the semester were solid, or you breezed through more papers than you expected to in a day. Somehow you didn’t really reach your students or really do meaningful labor. But you probably did, so why the impossible standard? Part of it comes down to academics being perfectionist nerds, and part of it is the capitalist, institutionalized pressure to work harder for longer. But I also think it derives from the care-centered, socially reproductive, noble ethic of teaching—teachers realize that it’s an existentially important job, so we hold ourselves to painful standards. There is Teaching, then there’s the reality of teaching, and guess where you always land.
In the United States, public schools are at least partially non-capitalist spaces, so of course the Right wants to obliterate them.
And the current reactionary strategy for destroying community schools is to accuse teachers (especially LGBTQ teachers) of being “groomers,” of wanting to sexually abuse or exploit their students. It’s a cynical maneuver by homophobic cretins, but it has already driven people out of the profession. Reactionaries know how to gin up a panic by pinning grooming on teachers in particular, because the idea of grooming—which really does happen to some young people, just usually not at the hands of a teacher—is so powerful, constituting as it does a fundamental perversion of a mentor / teacher / carer’s psychologically generative role. Groomer-teachers are figments of the conservative imagination 99% of the time; a thresher gobbles up the innocent anyway. It’s stochastic terror, and it’s working.
There is a fearful nervous vibe to the job these days. Cynics, fools, fascists, liars, xenophobes, and a slew of other men and women of violent imagination are—enabled by plutocrats with deep, dark pockets—gunning for all of us.
If you a teacher, you are in this fight, whether you like it or not.