Our Students Are Not Okay

Real quick up top: several reputable toolkits for helping the people of Gaza and urging the U.S. to ceasefire. Pick your favorite and spread it around!

• The All Out for Palestine Toolkit by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (my fav)
• Actionable ways to support the Palestinians of Gaza by the Aspecs Committed to Anti-Racism (ACAR) Discord serve
• Our History of Popular Resistance: Palestine Reading List by the Palestinian Youth Movement

Here in America, one of the few remaining feminist bookstores is in danger of closing! Bookends in Florence is a fantastic community space and the owner Madden is wonderful. Consider supporting this bookstore’s GoFundMe; after you’ve donated to Palestine, of course!

A lot of my educator friends have noticed trends of increased student stress and decreased attendance in their classes. For example, one of my classes—which takes place at 10 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays—has an enrollment of 40 students. Out of those 40 students, only ~10 show up to class regularly.

Now, I’m all about student agency and making my classrooms accessible; all my lectures are recorded and posted online, along with my slide decks and other activities. My students are adults and they have the freedom to make their own choices. If a few of my students chose to skip class on a given day for a job interview, if they were sick, or even just feeling tired or overwhelmed that day, that would be fine. But when most of your students don’t show up to class, that’s a sign that something bigger is going on.

A skeptical teacher might think that “these gen Z kids have gotten lazy / too rebellious, and have failed to recognize the importance of coming to class”. While I do think that coming to live class is the best way to experience my course, I just can’t squarely place this blame on students, and not just because I refuse to have adversarial relationship with them like other educators do. The issue here is multifaceted, and this one data point alone—lack of attendance—doesn’t reflect the full complexity of the problem. In fact, you’ll learn a lot about what’s going on by just asking students directly.

For one thing, students are overprogrammed. Engineering classes have always been difficult, but in a job market that expects applicants to have several years of experience for an entry level position, students are pressured to do a lot more than take lots of classes. Now, they have to join a research group, be a member of a professional society like AICHE, be on the executive board of at least two other clubs, and work co-ops/internships as much as possible. Also, college is not affordable like it was for my parent’s generation, so a lot of students work part-time or even full-time jobs. “Non-traditional students” are more common than ever, with more than a few of my students being Real Adults with spouses and kids. Today’s students are busier than ever, with many of my students, mentees, and advisees saying that they haven’t had a single hour of free time to themselves in months. It’s no surprise, then, that my students regularly take advantage of their ability to ask for a two-day extension on any assignment, no questions asked. On this past week’s homework, normally due Wednesday, 27 out of 40 students requested to submit it on Friday instead, simply because they have too many exams and projects due in other courses.

And then there’s—you know—the world collapsing all around them. A genocide is breaking out in Palestine that the United States is backing. Politicians are refusing to respond to calls for universal health care, common sense gun reform, restoring abortion rights, and more policies about bread-and-butter issues that have a majority popularity with all Americans, and are instead expending resources to attack trans people. Our country’s metrics for success focus on GDP and job creation, despite these having seemingly no bearing on how the average American is actually doing (many Americans need multiple jobs to stay afloat). Self-declared fascists are being entrusted with followings in the millions and, in some cases, public office. Lives are literally sacrificed to The Line so that oil companies and investment firms like BlackRock can have have increased year-over-year profits as our planet plummets into an uninhabitable state due to human-made climate change.

Essentially…

Even more disturbing than the apparent societal collapse is just how little adults seem to care. Adults are supposed to protect and mentor young people, assuring them that it will be okay and, when necessary, acting to change the status quo to ensure a better future. But us teachers aren’t doing nearly enough to challenge the systems that created the conditions for the above to happen. On a basic, psychological, primal level, young people are traumatized.

Young people see the difference between what they see on their phones (e.g., the real-time murder of thousands of Palestinians), mainstream news (justifications for this violence and support for a colonial nuclear power), what they hear about from their instructors (absolute silence).