Cinemorphosis

Tag: learning

  • You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    As Steve Lopez interrogates the strange psychological territory of retirement in Independence Day, I discovered an unnerving similarity between us. Lopez can be on vacation, officially released from work, walking around somewhere he is presumably supposed to be relaxing, and still find himself composing a newspaper column in his head. Nobody assigned it. No editor is waiting for it. There is no deadline. Yet the sentences begin assembling themselves anyway. After decades of journalism, the column has become a phantom limb. The job may be absent, but he can still feel it twitching.

    I understand the condition because I suffer from my own occupational haunting. Mine is the syllabus.

    To most people, writing a syllabus sounds like administrative dentistry. They imagine policies, due dates, grading percentages, office hours, and several pages of warnings about plagiarism. I experience something entirely different. Writing a syllabus is glorious. It is the intellectual equivalent of sitting at the master control panel of a spacecraft, surrounded by switches, blinking lights, and navigational screens while plotting a sixteen-week journey through the cosmos.

    Everything matters. Where does the first reading go? Which essay prepares students for the documentary? When do I introduce the counterargument? Which assignment arrives too early? Which one needs another week to ripen? I move readings forward and backward as if positioning armies before a decisive battle. A good syllabus has rhythm, escalation, reversals, callbacks, and a climax. It is not a calendar. It is narrative architecture.

    And I always want the final week to deliver the intellectual equivalent of the ending of the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston rides along the beach, sees the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand, falls to his knees, and realizes what has happened. That is Week Sixteen. I want the semester’s earlier ideas suddenly locking together. I want the students to see that the course they thought they were taking was actually about something larger. I want the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand.

    Then I can retire the course with a mic drop.

    When I am building a syllabus, I enter flow—that peculiar condition in which concentration becomes so complete that time disappears. I can sit down at five in the morning intending to move one reading and look up two hours later having reconstructed half the semester. Breakfast has been forgotten. Coffee has gone cold. The outside world has temporarily ceased operations. I am exactly where I want to be.

    This creates a problem for retirement.

    What happens when there are no more courses?

    I call it the Phantom Syllabus Principle: after decades of constructing courses, the professional task survives the profession that required it. Retirement can eliminate the classroom, the paycheck, the meetings, the grading, and the students, but it cannot necessarily shut down the machinery that spent forty years arranging ideas into sixteen-week journeys.

    I can already see the pathology developing. Three years after retirement, I will be sitting at home reading some fascinating book when a thought strikes me: This would pair beautifully with “The Lottery.”

    There will be no class.

    This will not matter.

    Within twenty minutes, I will have identified the documentary, formulated the essay prompt, devised three mapping components, constructed a counterargument, and determined that the entire unit belongs in Week Seven rather than Week Five. By lunch I will have a Canvas module for students who do not exist.

    At first glance, this sounds like another warning about the inability to let go of work. But I think it points toward something more hopeful: The Unretirable Self.

    One of retirement’s great terrors is the fear that when the job disappears, the person attached to it disappears as well. If I am no longer Professor McMahon standing in front of a classroom, who exactly is left?

    Perhaps more than I thought.

    The parts of teaching that exhausted me can retire quite easily. Grading can retire. Committee meetings can retire. Student Learning Outcomes can retire with full honors and never contact me again. I will not lie awake yearning for another opportunity to enter assessment data into an institutional website.

    But the creative machinery may refuse the pension.

    That is because some activities we perform at work are not merely occupational duties. They are expressions of temperament. Lopez doesn’t compose columns only because the Los Angeles Times pays him. His mind naturally turns experience into narrative. I don’t construct intellectual sequences only because a college gives me three units and a classroom. My mind likes taking books, films, arguments, cultural phenomena, and stray observations and arranging them until they reveal something larger.

    That part of me may be unemployable after retirement.

    It will not be retired.

    Perhaps retirement does not require the wholesale invention of a replacement identity. Some identities were artificial scaffolding: title, office, department, schedule, institutional status. Those can come down. But underneath them may be habits of mind that belonged to us all along.

    The institution can take back my office. It can remove my name from the schedule. It can deactivate my email, assign my courses to somebody thirty years younger, and eventually erase nearly every institutional trace that I was ever there.

    Fine.

    But someday, long after my final class has ended, I will wake at five in the morning with the sudden realization that Week Sixteen needs a better ending.

  • The Final-Season Principle of Retirement

    The Final-Season Principle of Retirement

    There I was, deep in the weeds of retirement, hacking my way through forms, passwords, security codes, pension calculations, Medicare applications, and all the other administrative vegetation that grows between a working person and his freedom. Retirement was still two semesters away, but I had already learned that you cannot begin preparing for it too early. I had finally obtained what I had come to think of as my revenue-stream number—the monthly pension figure that answered the most fundamental question of retirement planning: Would I be rich? No. Would I be homeless? Also no. This struck me as excellent news.

    I called my best friend and colleague, Tom, to tell him.

    Tom is seventy-five, a wrestling coach and physical-education instructor, and he has no intention of retiring. For him, leading students through weight training, tennis, pickleball, and wrestling is as natural as breathing. You do not wake up one morning and announce that after careful consideration you have decided to stop respiration. Why, then, would you stop coaching? As long as there are students to train, weights to lift, balls to hit, and wrestlers to instruct in the ancient art of folding another human being into an ottoman, Tom sees no compelling reason to leave.

    I told him that my situation was different. My retirement was approaching. In June 2027, at sixty-five years and eight months, I planned to finish my final semester, turn in my grades, close the office door, and walk away.

    Tom rejected this immediately.

    I couldn’t retire, he told me. I was the only writing instructor teaching the athletes in a face-to-face freshman composition class every fall. The students trusted me. The counselors trusted me. The coaches trusted me. I was loved. I was valued. I was useful. Most important, I was apparently irreplaceable, a status every employee spends forty years secretly craving and then discovers at retirement to be administratively inconvenient.

    Tom offered a solution.

    “If you retire, I can make sure you still teach that one class. It’ll be easy. You drive to campus one day a week, teach the athletes for two hours, and do the rest online. Everyone loves you—the students, the counselors, the coaches. We can’t lose you. Think about it.”

    I did.

    At first, I thought it was a wonderful idea.

    Why wouldn’t I? The arrangement offered nearly everything flattering about work while eliminating much of what I disliked. I could retire while remaining partially unretired. I could keep the class I loved, work with people who appreciated me, maintain my connection to campus, collect some additional income, and preserve the pleasant fiction that an institution of higher education might collapse if I failed to appear on Tuesday morning.

    It was enormously seductive.

    But over the next several days, something became clear.

    I didn’t want another season.

    I began thinking about careers the way I think about television series. The best ones know when to stop. Breaking Bad ended. The Sopranos ended. The Wire, The Americans, and Succession ended. Their creators understood something that television networks, aging rock bands, professional athletes, and tenured professors sometimes have difficulty accepting: the existence of an audience does not obligate you to continue performing.

    There is dignity in recognizing the endpoint.

    Call this the Final-Season Principle: the best time to end a successful career is while the audience still wishes there were another season.

    This sounds obvious until someone offers you another season.

    Then the ego gets involved.

    People still love you. They still laugh at your jokes. Students still tell you that you’re their favorite professor. Coaches tell you nobody can replace you. Counselors want you back. Your friend calls and offers you the professional equivalent of a victory lap: one class, one day a week, two hours on campus. Come on. Just six more episodes.

    This is how shows get into trouble.

    The great television series end while we are still arguing that they could have continued. The unfortunate ones mistake affection for infinite demand. They survive on reputation, nostalgia, and the emotional capital accumulated during their prime years. Nobody wants to insult them. Viewers speak respectfully about what the show once meant to them. They praise the original cast. They reminisce about the magnificent third season.

    They just don’t watch anymore.

    A career can end the same way.

    I have seen professors remain on campus beyond their natural final season. Nobody tells them. Academia is too polite for that. Colleagues praise their extraordinary service. Former students express affection. Administrators present plaques. Everyone behaves with appropriate reverence.

    But something has changed.

    The professor is still standing at the front of the classroom, but the performance has lost some electricity. The material hasn’t changed much in years. Grading has become heavier. Preparation feels more burdensome. Technology becomes increasingly irritating. Meetings that were once merely tedious now feel like violations of the Geneva Conventions. The professor may still be perfectly competent, but competence is no longer the issue.

    The season has ended.

    There can be sadness in watching someone refuse to acknowledge this. After decades of being Professor, Doctor, Coach, Director, or Dean, retirement threatens something more frightening than lost income. It threatens relevance. If students no longer wait outside your office, if colleagues no longer ask your opinion, if your name disappears from the schedule of classes, an unsettling question presents itself: Who am I when the institution no longer needs me?

    So you sign up for another semester.

    And then another.

    You tell yourself the students need you. Perhaps they do. You tell yourself the department needs you. Perhaps it does. But somewhere beneath these noble explanations lurks another possibility: you need them to need you.

    That is precisely the ending I want to avoid.

    I am not leaving because I dislike my students. I love working with them. I am not leaving because I dislike the coaches and counselors. Their affection makes leaving harder. Nor am I pretending that I am incapable of teaching another composition class. I could do it.

    But I can feel the wear.

    My cognitive machinery does not turn quite as effortlessly as it once did. Grading feels heavier. Creating fresh material requires more energy. Performing in front of a classroom takes more out of me. And my tolerance for administrative absurdity—particularly the contemplation of Student Learning Outcomes inside the Byzantine catacombs of Nuventive—has declined to levels that may soon require medical intervention.

    More important, I want that energy for something else.

    Retirement isn’t merely the absence of work. It is the transfer of a finite resource. Every hour I spend grading an essay is an hour I cannot spend reading, writing, exercising, traveling, being with my family, or discovering what life looks like when it is no longer organized around an academic calendar. Energy becomes more precious as you age. Eventually you have to decide where you want to spend it.

    And at the moment, I need a considerable portion of mine merely to retire.

    There are still Medicare forms to complete, pension systems to coordinate, insurance dates to excavate, passwords to resurrect, documents to locate, appointments to schedule, and websites to enter with the grim concentration of a bomb technician approaching the red wire. I cannot fight the retirement bureaucracy while simultaneously grading freshman essays, creating engaging classroom content, and analyzing Student Learning Outcomes for a website apparently designed by the imperial bureaucracy of Emperor Justinian.

    Something has to give.

    It will be the job.

    So I will call Tom and disappoint him.

    I will tell him how much his offer meant to me. I will tell him that being wanted at the end of a career is an extraordinary gift. I will tell him that I love the athletes, the coaches, the counselors, and the peculiar little community we built together. And then I will tell him no.

    Because the Final-Season Principle contains a truth that becomes harder to understand precisely when people are begging you to stay: being loved is not a reason to keep working forever. Sometimes being loved is evidence that you have reached the perfect moment to leave.

    The show had a good run.

    It wasn’t canceled.

    I ended it.

  • How 10,000 Students Ruined My Misanthropy

    How 10,000 Students Ruined My Misanthropy

    In 1984, when I was in college, I was knocked sideways by A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s great comic novel about the picaresque adventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a bloated, know-it-all misanthrope who regards nearly every human being he encounters as evidence of civilization’s decline. The title comes from Jonathan Swift: “When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

    I never considered myself a genius, but the second half of Swift’s proposition appealed to me enormously. Perhaps the world really was a confederacy of dolts. Some of my favorite comedians seemed to agree. George Carlin surveyed humanity and found an inexhaustible supply of idiots. David Letterman arrived on television with the weary expression of a man who had already heard your story and regretted it. His grumpy deadpan seemed perfectly suited to the beginning of a new decade. Disco was departing. Good riddance. Disco was for dunces. Deadpan irony was for people who understood things.

    At least that was how I saw it.

    Misanthropy struck me as a form of intellectual street cred. If you were disgusted with humanity, presumably you had seen through it. Optimists were rubes; cynics had X-ray vision. I imagined becoming a comic novelist with a misanthropic edge, skewering the fools who wandered into my field of vision.

    Unfortunately, contempt is a lousy substitute for insight.

    My fictional characters tended to be flat and two-dimensional because I had already convicted them before they entered the story. They existed to be mocked, not understood. The expression “punching down” wasn’t part of the cultural vocabulary of the 1980s, but I would have benefited enormously from understanding the concept. Satire without empathy can quickly deteriorate into a bully standing over his victims and congratulating himself on his wit.

    Then, through a sequence of accidents that hardly resembled career planning, I stumbled into teaching college writing at twenty-four. In 1987, a friend’s father needed instructors for a Merritt College bridge program at Skyline High School and couldn’t find enough people to teach the classes. I agreed to help.

    That temporary job lasted thirty-nine years.

    I taught for two years in the Bay Area, seven in Bakersfield, and thirty in Los Angeles. Somewhere along the way, nearly 10,000 students passed through my classrooms.

    They ruined my misanthropy.

    It is difficult to maintain a sweeping contempt for humanity when humanity keeps arriving in your classroom every semester with names, families, jokes, ambitions, insecurities, talents, disasters, and complicated histories. My students were too intelligent, contradictory, funny, wounded, resilient, exasperating, and generous to fit inside the crude categories of my younger imagination. The closer I looked at people, the less useful my caricatures became.

    Perhaps I am biased. An absurdly high percentage of my students treated me with kindness. They forgave me when I arrived with mediocre material and rewarded me extravagantly when I brought something worthwhile. On good days, the room crackled. Students argued, laughed, challenged me, and occasionally produced that rare classroom electricity when everyone seemed to understand that something interesting was happening.

    They also discovered that my tortured soul was an excellent source of entertainment.

    The more lugubrious I became, the funnier they found me. I could enter class burdened by some private catastrophe, convinced that existence was a bleak corridor leading toward oblivion, and within minutes twenty-five students would be laughing at me. I found this strangely therapeutic. If my despair could become somebody else’s comedy, perhaps despair wasn’t quite as formidable as I imagined. My students taught me, among other things, not to take my suffering entirely at face value.

    My empathy deepened again in 2010 when I became the father of twins. Parenthood rearranged my vision. Suddenly, when a student struggled, I could imagine one of my daughters sitting in that chair. The exhausted student, the confused student, the student who had fallen behind and was embarrassed to ask for help—each became somebody’s child in a way I had understood intellectually but not viscerally.

    I wish I had possessed that parent-vision when I began teaching. It would have made me a better instructor from the first day. I undoubtedly mistook confusion for laziness, immaturity for indifference, and struggle for lack of character more often than I would like to remember. I cannot travel backward and repair those failures. I can only recognize them.

    Now I am retiring.

    I will miss my students—all 10,000 of them, give or take a few hundred victims of my arithmetic. The overwhelming majority were kind, intelligent, curious, and hungry for the same things human beings have always wanted: connection, dignity, purpose, and some reasonable measure of happiness.

    I ask their forgiveness for the days when my selfish, surly self commandeered the classroom. And I thank them for the laughter, generosity, and encouragement they gave me on the days when my better self managed to show up.

    One thing I know after nearly forty years: sustained contact with actual human beings makes serious misanthropy difficult. You can despise “people” in the abstract. It becomes harder when people acquire faces.

    I still love A Confederacy of Dunces. I still love Ignatius J. Reilly. But after spending four decades in classrooms, I suspect I understand something that Ignatius never did. The confederacy of dunces is largely an illusion produced by distance. Get close enough to the supposed dunces, listen to their stories, watch them struggle, and allow them to laugh at you for a few decades, and the confederacy begins to dissolve.

    Had Ignatius J. Reilly been sentenced to forty years of teaching college writing, even he might have been cured.

    Although I suspect his student evaluations would have been spectacular.

  • The Price of Admission

    The Price of Admission

    Walking to my office this morning on the first day of the semester, I came upon a sight I had never seen before. A line of students curled around the library lawn, hundreds of them standing shoulder to shoulder in the morning sun. I estimated more than four hundred.

    I stopped and asked one of the students what everyone was waiting for.

    “Laptop loaners,” he said.

    The answer caught me off guard. These weren’t students lining up for concert tickets, free food, or some first-week campus giveaway. They were waiting to borrow the basic piece of equipment required to function as a college student in 2026.

    I looked at the line again, and it suddenly appeared different. I had to assume that many of these students simply couldn’t afford to spend even $300 on a Chromebook. They needed a computer to write papers, access Canvas, conduct research, communicate with professors, and complete the daily machinery of college life, yet purchasing one was beyond what their budgets could absorb.

    The sight humbled me because I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about computers. I research processors, RAM, displays, keyboards, battery life, and the microscopic differences between one generation of hardware and the next. I can become genuinely excited about a new chip or convince myself that some incremental specification represents a meaningful technological event. Meanwhile, four hundred students were wrapped around the library lawn waiting to borrow a machine that could run a browser and open a word processor.

    Standing there, I also confronted the enormous difference between the economic world in which I attended college and the one my students inhabit. My generation had its struggles, and nostalgia can easily airbrush them away. But college was cheaper. Housing consumed a smaller portion of ordinary incomes. The job market was more forgiving of young people trying to find their footing. The financial penalties for making a few wrong turns were not always so severe.

    My students have entered adulthood in a different economy. Tuition, rent, food, transportation, and nearly every other necessity compete for money many of them simply don’t have. Even the laptop that college now quietly assumes every student owns can become a luxury.

    I continued walking toward my office, carrying an uncomfortable awareness of the distance between my college experience and theirs. I had always known that distance existed. But abstract knowledge is bloodless. It is one thing to read about economic inequality and another to see it materialize in front of you as four hundred young people standing in a line, waiting for a computer.

  • When Reading Lost to the Dopamine Feed

    When Reading Lost to the Dopamine Feed

    Rose Horowitch’s essay “The End of Reading Is Here,” published in The Atlantic, chronicles more than the decline of reading. It examines the kind of mind that flourishes after reading has surrendered. Citing data from the National Endowment for the Arts, she notes that fewer than half of American adults read any kind of book in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. By 2023, a mere 16 percent reported reading for pleasure.

    What filled the vacuum? Gambling.

    Nearly 60 percent of Americans now gamble. We have traded one form of anticipation for another. Instead of turning pages in search of revelation, we pull slot-machine levers and refresh sports-betting apps in pursuit of dopamine.

    Even the books that survive have changed. Sentences are shorter. Syntax is simpler. Apparently, asking readers to navigate a few dependent clauses before arriving at the independent clause is now considered an unreasonable burden. The modern sentence has become a microwave dinner: engineered for speed, stripped of complexity, and consumed with minimal effort.

    The same contraction has reshaped our news diet. Long-form reporting that patiently excavates facts has given way to sixty-second video clips engineered for maximum stimulation. The reward is immediate. The understanding is shallow. It requires no political science degree to imagine what happens to a democracy when its citizens lose both the patience and the habit of sustained attention.

    Horowitch argues that this decline in reading parallels a decline in critical thinking itself. Increasing numbers of adults struggle to comprehend what they read, distinguish evidence from assertion, or draw reasonable conclusions. If adulthood once implied literacy, then America is drifting toward a peculiar form of cultural infantilization—a nation increasingly vulnerable to demagogues, conspiracy peddlers, and professional grifters eager to convert intellectual laziness into political capital.

    The greatest irony is that Americans have never consumed more words.

    We read texts, emails, Slack messages, Instagram captions, TikTok comments, headlines, notifications, and endless streams of digital debris. Never has so much language been processed to produce so little contemplation. We are drowning in words while starving for thought.

    That is why Horowitch describes America as becoming postliterate—not because language has disappeared, but because sustained reading has. Literacy once demanded immersion. Postliteracy rewards interruption.

    Nor has this transformation stabilized. It is accelerating. Each generation spends less time reading books and more time marinating its attention inside algorithmically curated feeds. Television, for all its faults, never possessed this power. During the television era, people still disappeared into novels on weekends and carried paperbacks to the beach. TV occupied a room. Smartphones occupy consciousness itself. They transformed distraction from an activity into a permanent habitat.

    I have watched this transformation from a privileged vantage point. For nearly forty years, I have taught college writing.

    The curriculum my colleagues and I teach today would have been almost unrecognizable when I began. We rarely assign long books. Many instructors assign none at all. My freshman composition course still requires one short classic, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. My critical thinking course assigns no books whatsoever. Instead, students read essays from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. I upload the readings into Canvas, then spend class breaking them into digestible segments through Google Slides. Each slide contains roughly one hundred words followed by a discussion question that forces students to wrestle with the author’s reasoning one piece at a time.

    Some critics insist that professors should simply assign longer books and demand compliance. That fantasy evaporates the moment it encounters reality. Students vote with their enrollment. Assign too much reading, and many will either avoid the course altogether or quietly migrate to instructors who require less. Consumer demand has entered higher education whether professors approve or not. As students’ habits change, curriculum follows. The postliterate marketplace shapes the classroom long before faculty meetings do.

    Yet calling ours a “postliterate society” risks flattening important distinctions.

    My students are mostly between eighteen and twenty years old. Yes, they grew up on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Yes, many arrive having read remarkably few books. But they are also intellectually curious. They enjoy argumentation. They respond viscerally to sharp prose, elegant rhetoric, and clever turns of phrase. They relish exposing logical fallacies and dismantling weak arguments. Once you capture their attention, they often surprise you with the sophistication of their thinking.

    They are not representative of America at large.

    A first-generation college student eager to transform his life occupies a different intellectual universe than an adult who never pursued higher education, works a dead-end job, and spends every evening numbing himself with algorithmic entertainment. Both may read fewer books than previous generations, but their relationship to knowledge is hardly the same. There is no single postliteracy. There are many varieties of it.

    Technology rewires us from the inside out. I can measure the changes in my own brain. At sixty-four, I find myself fighting distractions that barely existed thirty years ago. My attention requires more vigilance than it once did. The temptation to surrender to endless scrolling is no respecter of age, education, or profession. Digital gravity pulls on all of us.

    There is no reversing this transformation. The toothpaste is out of the tube. The smartphone is not going away. Artificial intelligence is not going away. Algorithmic media is not going away. We are not marching back to 1975 carrying hardcovers beneath our arms.

    That reality, however, should make us suspicious of sweeping declarations about postliteracy. Horowitch rightly identifies genuine losses: diminished attention spans, weaker reading comprehension, and shrinking tolerance for intellectual complexity. But we have also developed new literacies. We decode memes, navigate digital ecosystems, detect online irony, understand platform cultures, and learn new technologies with astonishing speed. Our cognitive landscape has not simply shrunk. It has been reorganized.

    Whether that reorganization represents progress remains an open question.

    I doubt we will someday revolt against TikTok and rediscover Tolstoy en masse. The fantasy of 90 percent of Americans reading one hundred books a year belongs somewhere between nostalgia and science fiction.

    Still, I hesitate to declare the reading life permanently dead.

    Human beings possess an appetite that algorithms cannot completely satisfy. Endless novelty eventually becomes monotonous. Constant stimulation eventually feels empty. Even the most dedicated scroller occasionally hungers for something with weight, texture, and permanence—an idea worth wrestling with rather than merely reacting to.

    Curiosity has survived every technological revolution humanity has endured. It survived radio. It survived television. It may yet survive TikTok.

    The reading brain has been wounded.

    I am not convinced it is beyond recovery.

  • Why Online Education Deserves Defending

    Why Online Education Deserves Defending

    Since the COVID lockdown, most of my teaching has migrated online. Even now, roughly three-fourths of my courses remain in the digital realm, where students encounter me less as a flesh-and-blood professor pacing beneath fluorescent lights and more as a disembodied presence living inside Canvas announcements, discussion boards, and video lectures recorded in my home office.

    To my surprise, retention rates remain strong. That fact alone suggests online learning serves a real need for many students whose lives resemble logistical hostage situations involving jobs, childcare, commutes, aging parents, unstable work schedules, and economic exhaustion. For these students, online education is not a luxury. It is the only doorway left open.

    Still, online learning clearly is not for everyone.

    Today’s Los Angeles Times article, “‘I felt like I wasn’t learning’: Community college students struggle with online education” by Adam Echelman, highlights several genuine problems now reshaping higher education.

    First, nearly 40 percent of community college classes are online, leaving many campuses eerily underpopulated. I see this myself every time I walk across campus beneath giant stretches of empty concrete where student traffic once resembled an airport terminal. Some days the college feels less like a thriving institution of learning and more like the abandoned set of a post-apocalyptic indie film where only the squirrels still believe enrollment is healthy.

    Second, online education is highly vulnerable to AI-assisted academic dishonesty. Entire assignments can now be outsourced to machines with frightening ease. Students who once copied homework from friends can now summon instant essays, summaries, reflections, and discussion-board responses generated in seconds by software that never sleeps and never complains about deadlines. Academic rigor has unquestionably been destabilized.

    Third, many students experience profound disorientation in online courses. They sit alone at glowing screens trying to decode unfamiliar interfaces, navigate modules, interpret assignment instructions, and manage deadlines without the immediate human structure of a physical classroom. Some students thrive in this environment. Others feel psychologically untethered, as though they have been dropped into an educational escape room with no map and unreliable Wi-Fi.

    All of these criticisms contain truth.

    But I still feel compelled to defend online education because face-to-face instruction creates its own formidable barriers that critics often romanticize away.

    Many students simply do not possess the time, transportation, money, childcare, emotional bandwidth, or scheduling flexibility necessary to attend traditional classes several times a week. Others suffer from social anxiety so severe that walking into a crowded classroom feels less like entering a learning environment and more like arriving for public execution. Some students experience the same confusion staring at a printed syllabus that others experience navigating Canvas. Confusion is not unique to online learning; it is part of learning itself.

    And AI has disrupted all education, not merely online education.

    The fantasy that we can restore some pristine pre-pandemic classroom paradise by dragging everyone back into physical seats ignores reality entirely. Face-to-face classes are also saturated with AI. Students use it in dorm rooms, libraries, cafeterias, parking lots, and sometimes while sitting directly in front of us pretending to take notes. The disruption is universal.

    We are living through a historical transition in which educators are desperately trying to preserve critical thinking, reading, writing, and job preparation while technological conditions mutate faster than institutional bureaucracy can respond. No one possesses perfect answers. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling nostalgia disguised as certainty.

    But I remain optimistic.

    Online teaching continues improving. Faculty are becoming more sophisticated in course design, communication, engagement strategies, video instruction, accessibility, and platform navigation. We are learning how to create clearer modules, more interactive coursework, better communication systems, and stronger student support structures. In many cases, students now receive the best aspects of both worlds: the flexibility of online access combined with increasingly refined teaching methods.

    And flexibility matters enormously.

    For many community college students, education is squeezed into the margins of adult survival. They complete assignments after ten-hour shifts, during lunch breaks, inside parked cars, while supervising children, or late at night after the household finally quiets down. Critics who romanticize the traditional campus experience often imagine eighteen-year-olds strolling across ivy-covered quads discussing philosophy beneath oak trees. Community college reality is far less cinematic. It involves exhaustion, economic pressure, and scheduling warfare.

    All of higher education is undergoing massive disruption simultaneously:

    • AI is transforming intellectual labor.
    • Student attention spans are changing.
    • Economic pressures are intensifying.
    • Online teaching technologies are improving.
    • Work and family demands are growing more brutal.

    Under these conditions, demanding a wholesale return to “the old ways” feels less like wisdom and more like denial.

    The old world is not coming back.

    That does not mean standards should collapse or that online learning is automatically superior. It means education must evolve alongside the lives students actually live rather than the lives institutions nostalgically wish they still lived.

    Online education will continue improving because necessity drives innovation with ruthless efficiency. Likewise, our understanding of how to create meaningful, rigorous, and humane education in the AI Age will continue evolving. We are not witnessing the death of learning. We are witnessing the painful reconstruction of it.

    The task now is not retreat. It is adaptation.

    It is time to move forward rather than cling romantically to a vanished academic world that technology, economics, and history have already left behind.

  • Lost in the Gasbaggerate

    Lost in the Gasbaggerate

    Scripture, if you strip it of incense and italics, offers a blunt warning: don’t build your life on display. Ostentation is not a virtue; it’s a leak. It drains whatever substance you have and then pretends the shine is the thing itself. I think about that now, with the benefit of hindsight and a modest inventory of regrets, and I return to my early twenties at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, just down the road from the well-coiffed calm of the Claremont Hotel.

    Jackson’s was a holding pen for the overqualified. My coworkers were armed with advanced degrees—literature, linguistics, anthropology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, musicology—and a shared conviction that the adult world had failed them first. Institutions were beneath them. Corporations were vulgar. Authority was for other people. So they took their talents to the wine rack and poured them into attitude.

    They sold Bordeaux and Belgian ales with a cultivated disdain for both product and purchaser. Customers were a nuisance; humanity, a disappointment. The house philosophy could be summarized in a single phrase, delivered with a raised eyebrow: “service with a smirk.” Irony was their armor and their currency. They wore it everywhere.

    What I didn’t see then—but can’t miss now—is how perfectly this posture trains a man in gasbaggery. It rewards the performance of intelligence over the practice of it, the pose of superiority over the discipline of work. You learn to talk rather than to build, to signal rather than to serve. You become fluent in contempt and call it discernment.

    It felt like elevation. It was, in fact, a form of drift—polished, articulate, and entirely unmoored.

    Over time as we drifted into complacency and lost awareness of our arrogance and folly, we became unwitting members of the Gasbaggerate: a self-appointed guild of eloquent overtalkers who mistake endurance for insight and airtime for authority. Its members gather—physically or online—to exchange monologues disguised as dialogue, each contribution longer, louder, and more self-satisfied than the last. They pride themselves on nuance but deploy it like a garnish, sprinkling just enough complexity to justify their verbosity while never approaching a conclusion that might end the performance. In the Gasbaggerate, listening is considered a quaint hobby, brevity a moral failing, and the highest form of achievement is to leave a room convinced that something important has been said, even if no one can quite recall what it was.

    During the wine store’s slow hours, we would display our commitment to the Gasbaggerate by discussing the philosophical curiosities of Nietzsche, the musical excesses of Wagner, and the literary conundrums of Kafka. In many ways, the job had become my comfort zone. It offered me no challenges, yet at the same time, it afforded me the delusion that I was smarter than most people. Whatever I lacked in finances, I compensated with excessive self-regard. Over time, it became clear to me that the longer I worked alongside these proud misfits, the more certain I would become incurably unemployable. 

    I was drawn to the idea of becoming part of my co-workers’ elitist tribe. Though I had nearly completed my master’s degree in English, I never felt like a good fit for academia. I rarely read what professors had on their syllabi. Instead, I would read what I wanted to read, regardless of its relevance to the class content. I could barely sit still during class. I became restless, fidgety, self-conscious, and prone to social anxieties. It was rare that I ever listened to the professors’ lectures. My mind tended to wander about random worries–my bleak romantic prospects, the lack of airflow inside the classroom, my loathing of driving in traffic to get to the gym after classes, and the absence of high-protein food in my house. I didn’t even like the physical presence of the university with its modern sculptures on the lawns, plaques dedicated to a variety of stodgy luminaries, and the fluorescent-lit classrooms reeking of industrial disinfectants. When people asked me what I majored in, I told them, half-seriously, that I was majoring in “Get the Hell Out” because my discomfort with college compelled me to rid myself of academic life as soon as possible. 

    In contrast, I was comfortable being a professional slacker at the wine store. Cultivating my irony and sarcasm with my coworkers and the regular customers was my Happy Place. In the lax work environment, I was confident I could go on indefinitely. My paycheck would be too small to buy new cars or pay for medical insurance. Still, the superior physical and spiritual health I could enjoy from “not selling out to the mainstream” would be worth the risk of having to pay out of pocket for the occasional dose of antibiotics. 

    In my mid-twenties, I was content to spend the rest of my life being a slacker clerk at the wine store, throwing a Nerf football ball to my co-workers through the aisles of Chianti and Beaujolais, and expounding on the mysterious writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Moravia, and Miguel de Unamuno. 

    Then one day in the late summer of 1987 I was kicked out of my comfort zone and became the Accidental Professor when my friend Mike Elizalde’s father, Felix Elizalde, a top administrator at Merritt College, begged me to teach for his college when none of his real English professors would get off their asses and teach a special Bridge Program at Skyline High School.  “But Mr. Elizalde, I don’t know anything about teaching. I don’t even have a credential.” The chancellor of community colleges said, “No problem,” and I heard his dot matrix printer in his office churning out my California Community College Teaching Credential. I stared at the document like Luke Skywalker seeing for the first time the glowing saber. 

    Of course, the freshly-printed credential didn’t magically transform me into an actual college professor. This became evident one afternoon while working at the wine store and pouring Braren Pauli merlot to a Cal Berkeley professor in the wine bar. I anxiously confided with him that I was terrified about my new job as a college instructor and the dread I felt for having absolutely no idea what I should be doing in the classroom. With a mane of gray lion’s hair and matching beard, the scholar sipped his merlot, studied me carefully, and told me, “Being a professor is the same as being a carpenter. You bring your materials to the classroom and you and the students build structures together. There will be many occasions when the students won’t want to be in the classroom and they will resist everything you say. Though silent, their collective presence will create an air of hostility in the room. You will have the strong impression that you are talking to yourself and a part of you will die inside. This is where your professionalism kicks in. Through sheer ego and professionalism that demands that you get through the course objectives, you have to ignore their indifference and execute your craft the way a carpenter would build a house.”

    Thirty-five years later, I would like to tell him that I never forgot his advice, but I would not tell him the part where on some occasions I would plow through a lecture that was received by the students with implacable indifference, drive home questioning the purpose of my existence, collapse on my bed, curl into the fetal position, and cry myself to sleep.

    The Berkeley scholar proved to be right. The best philosophy was to show up to class prepared, brimming with the confidence from that preparation, but be prepared for the students to be disaffected and disengaged at times for reasons that had nothing to do with me but everything to do with their personal concerns: a distressing romance, an aching hunger, money problems, family disputes. Forces were affecting my students’ interest levels that I could not control. If I were to survive as an instructor, I had to acknowledge this brutal fact; on some occasions, I had to be prepared for the ego sting of disengagement and feeling I was talking to myself in a room of thirty-five people, then power my way through the class objectives even when I didn’t feel popular and “loved.” The sooner I realized the classroom was about them and their concerns, and not mine, the better off I would be.

    Being a successful instructor meant more than being a carpenter. It also meant finding ways to remove my Selfish default setting and entertain the radical proposition that I was not put on Earth to be loved but rather to be of service to others. But to be successful at a job that almost came to me as a freak accident, I would have to struggle to remove depart from my role as a navel-gazing narcissist performing as a know-it-all at a dead-end job. 

    Had Felix Elizalde not administered a well-timed kick to my posterior in 1987 and pushed me into teaching at Merritt College, I might have perfected the art of professional drift—clocking in at Jackson’s, polishing my ego to a high gloss, and mistaking self-display for a life. That alternate version of me required no great catastrophe. It was the path of least resistance, paved with vanity and lightly dusted with delusion.

    We love to credit ourselves with vision, ambition, the mythology of the self-made man. It’s a flattering story: lone hero, steady climb, destiny fulfilled. My life refuses to cooperate with that narrative. It looks less like a conquest and more like a rescue operation—dependent on other people’s interventions, good timing, and the occasional lucky shove in the right direction.

    Remove those external corrections—none of which were earned by my sterling character—and I suspect I would have settled into a comfortable swamp of mediocrity, happily narrating my own importance while achieving very little. I would have been busy talking, less busy becoming.

    That’s the part we don’t advertise: how close most lives are to going quietly off the rails. Not in flames, but in drift. Extinction doesn’t always arrive as catastrophe. Sometimes it shows up as a man who never quite got started and never quite noticed.

  • A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    In “Has College Gotten Too Easy?”, Joe Pinsker notes a curious inversion: grades rise as the quality of student work declines. He borrows a distinction from a Harvard sociologist—“easy” can mean lighter material or looser grading—and suggests the latter is doing most of the work. From where I sit, it’s both. Around 2010, as reading skills began to erode, writing instructors quietly trimmed the syllabus. Fewer essays, fewer books, and almost nothing long. The last time I assigned The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a 500-page climb, the backlash was volcanic. Students weren’t being asked to read; they were being asked to endure. It felt less like instruction and more like pitting a white belt against a black belt and calling it pedagogy.

    Something fundamental shifted at the same moment. The smartphone didn’t just arrive; it reprogrammed. We moved from readers to watchers. As readers, we practiced interiority—the habit of turning language inward until it took root. Sentences weren’t skimmed; they were inhabited. Ideas weren’t collected; they were argued with, revised, made to answer to memory and conscience. Interiority is not mere comprehension; it is a private workshop where meaning is built, not downloaded.

    Around 2010, that workshop closed early. In its place came what I’ll call dopaminergic exteriority: attention pulled outward by a conveyor belt of novelty—short videos, endless scroll, perpetual interruption—until thought has no time to cohere. The mind becomes a relay station for images, optimized for reaction rather than reflection. The inner dialogue thins to a whisper; the feed does the talking.

    The consequences show up in the classroom. Interiority tends to produce patience, skepticism, and a tolerance for difficulty—the raw materials of maturity. Exteriority produces the opposite: impatience, certainty without evidence, and a preference for the quick hit. Ask for Moby-Dick and you’ll get a highlight reel about “the great whale” in thirty seconds. The novel becomes a rumor; the rumor earns the grade.

    Institutions adapt. They always do. Assignments shrink. Expectations soften. Grades inflate to meet the new baseline of attention. Students, understandably, demand high marks for low friction; colleges, increasingly, oblige. The result is not a conspiracy but a convergence: a curriculum calibrated to the scroll.

    We tell ourselves this is access, flexibility, modernization. There’s some truth in that. But there’s also evasion. A watered-down education is what you get when a culture trades interiority for the next stimulus. We begin to prefer performance to thinking, identity to argument, and ease to effort. We stop reading the world and start skimming it.

    None of this is irreversible, but it is cumulative. Interiority is a practice; it returns when practiced. Assign the long book again. Require the sustained argument. Give students something that resists them. Not because difficulty is virtuous, but because without it, the mind never learns to stay.

  • Teaching Without a Map in a Shifting World

    Teaching Without a Map in a Shifting World

    In “Teaching in an American University Is Very Strange Right Now,” Frank Bruni captures a tension that defines the modern classroom: how do you offer students hope without lying to them? His students at Duke University are coming of age in a moment that feels less like a transition and more like a rupture—truth is contested, institutions feel unstable, artificial intelligence is reshaping entire professions, and the political climate leans toward confusion and consolidation of power. Add to that a job market where careers in public policy, government, and nonprofits are shrinking, and the traditional pathways begin to look like dead ends.

    Bruni’s difficulty is not just emotional; it’s epistemological. The ground keeps shifting. The job market no longer behaves like a map you can study and memorize. It behaves like weather—volatile, unpredictable, and indifferent to your plans. Bruni and his colleagues find themselves in an unfamiliar position: experts who no longer trust their own expertise. When the mentors are unsure of the terrain, the act of mentoring starts to feel like guesswork dressed up as guidance.

    And yet, retreating into cynicism would be a dereliction of duty. Bruni insists on offering hope, but not the anesthetized version that avoids discomfort. His version of hope is anchored in reality. He tells his students that survival in this environment will not belong to the most credentialed or the most specialized, but to the most adaptable. The winners will be those who can pivot quickly, read patterns early, and anticipate what’s coming before it arrives. In other words, they must think several moves ahead while the board itself is being rearranged.

    This requires a shift in how students approach their education. The old model—bury yourself in your major, master the material, trust that the system will reward you—was always a partial truth. Now it’s a liability. Depth without awareness is no longer enough. Students need a wide-angle lens, an ongoing scan of the broader landscape: economic shifts, technological disruptions, political currents. The classroom can no longer be a refuge from the world; it has to be a vantage point from which to read it.

    Bruni’s message is unsettling, but it has the virtue of being honest. Hope, in this context, is not the promise that things will work out as planned. It’s the conviction that those who stay alert, flexible, and strategically aware can still find a way forward—even when the path refuses to stay still.

  • The Kryptonite Effect of Screens in Education

    The Kryptonite Effect of Screens in Education

    In her Atlantic essay “What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens,” the author examines a belief so widely accepted it rarely gets questioned: that more technology automatically improves learning. Dylan Kane, a seventh-grade math teacher, bought into that belief for over a decade. His students worked on Chromebooks, navigating a custom-built math site while monitoring software kept them from drifting into games or distractions. It was a tightly managed digital ecosystem—efficient on paper, persuasive in theory.

    Then Kane pulled the plug.

    This wasn’t a minor adjustment; it was a small act of rebellion. Nearly ninety percent of school districts now issue laptops or tablets, sold on the promise of “personalization”—the idea that technology can tailor instruction to each student’s needs, close learning gaps, and adapt to different cognitive styles. It’s an elegant theory, especially attractive to those whose reputations and revenue depend on merging education with technology.

    But in Kane’s classroom, the theory collapsed under the weight of actual human behavior. Screens didn’t personalize learning; they colonized attention. Students stared at them the way gamblers stare at slot machines—fixed, hypnotized, and detached from the room. Class discussion withered. The teacher’s voice, once the organizing force of the classroom, lost every round to the glowing rectangle. When attention becomes a zero-sum game, the screen doesn’t negotiate. It wins.

    Kane’s frustration deepened when he read Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion, which argues that increased technology use correlates with declining student performance. So Kane ran an experiment: he removed the Chromebooks for a month. What he discovered was not subtle. Students began paying attention again. Participation returned. Assignment completion jumped from 45 to 62 percent. Writing equations by hand—slow, deliberate, mildly inconvenient—forced students to see their own thinking unfold. The inconvenience turned out to be the point. Learning, it seems, benefits from friction.

    I’ve been teaching college writing for over thirty-five years, and I’ve seen my own version of this “kryptonite effect.” Smartphones siphon attention. Laptops become portals to games, sports, and anything but the task at hand. I’ve watched students drift out of the room without leaving their seats. The screen doesn’t just distract; it competes, and it usually wins.

    And yet, my experience isn’t a simple indictment of technology. Between 2018 and 2019, I ran a structure that worked. We met twice a week: one day for lecture and discussion, the other as a writing lab. During lab sessions, students wrote on desktops or their own laptops, working through scaffolded assignments. I read their drafts in real time, helping them revise thesis statements and sharpen arguments. The dynamic shifted. I wasn’t a distant lecturer; I was a coach moving from desk to desk. Students completed work on campus instead of procrastinating at home. Completion rates improved, not because of the machines themselves, but because of how they were used.

    The pandemic ended that model. My courses shifted to a hybrid format—one meeting a week—and the lab disappeared. I’ve been reluctant to surrender precious face-to-face time to silent writing sessions. But I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been too cautious. If Kane is right about the power of attention, perhaps the most effective use of class time is not more talking, but more doing.

    What Kane’s experiment ultimately reveals is not that technology is useless, but that it is context-dependent. A math classroom, built on sequential problem-solving, may suffer when screens fracture attention. A writing classroom, structured around drafting and revision, may benefit from them under the right conditions. The mistake is not using technology. The mistake is treating it as a universal solution.

    If I were back to teaching two days a week, I wouldn’t hesitate. One day for discussion. One day for writing in a lab. Not because technology is inherently good, but because, in that setting, it serves the work instead of sabotaging it.