Cinemorphosis

Tag: learning

  • 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.

  • Lecture Drift Syndrome and the Vanishing Classroom

    Lecture Drift Syndrome and the Vanishing Classroom

    My students have been reporting a peculiar academic phenomenon: the two-hour class that contains no discernible lesson. In its place stands a performer—a professor intoxicated by the belief that a self-indulgent monologue is effective teaching. Convinced they possess the sacred “gift of gab,” they proceed to use it like a leaf blower in a library.

    And gab they do.

    They narrate their dreams with the seriousness of a Jungian symposium, decoding every symbol as if the subconscious were filing quarterly reports. They recount contractor disputes with the dramatic tension of courtroom testimony. They offer serialized updates on family feuds, restaurant conquests, tropical vacations, and medical procedures so vivid they border on malpractice to describe. They even resurrect their collegiate glory days, in which they allegedly outwitted professors and classmates alike—a mythos delivered with the confidence of a man who has never been fact-checked.

    Meanwhile, the classroom undergoes a quiet evacuation.

    Not physically—students remain seated, dutiful, nodding at appropriate intervals—but cognitively, the room is abandoned. One student is deep into a novel. Another is solving calculus proofs. Several are toggling between sports highlights and sports betting apps, hedging their attention the way day traders hedge risk. Text messages fly. Homework from other classes gets completed. What was scheduled as instruction has been repurposed into a supervised study hall with a live podcast no one asked to attend.

    The professor, of course, notices none of this.

    This is the defining pathology: two monumental blind spots. First, the inability to recognize that the monologue is not merely irrelevant but actively draining—an intellectual sedative administered over two uninterrupted hours. Second, the delusion that presence equals engagement, that a room full of bodies must also be a room full of minds.

    It is neither.

    What we are witnessing is an academic epidemic: Lecture Drift Syndrome. A condition in which a class session slowly detaches from its stated purpose and floats into the open sea of anecdote, confession, and self-display. The syllabus becomes a relic. Time warps—two hours pass, yet nothing has been learned. Themes dissolve. Structure collapses. The lecture doesn’t end so much as it dissipates.

    In the end, the classroom is no longer a site of instruction.

    It is a stage occupied by one man talking—and thirty students elsewhere.

  • The Sleepwalking Student: Why Friction, Not Optimization, Reawakens Learning

    The Sleepwalking Student: Why Friction, Not Optimization, Reawakens Learning

    Academic Anhedonia is what it feels like to keep advancing through your education while feeling absolutely nothing about it. The assignments get done. The rubrics are satisfied. The credentials inch closer. And yet curiosity never sparks, pride never arrives, and learning registers as a faint neurological hum—like an appliance left on in another room. You move forward without momentum, effort without appetite. AI language machines make this easier, smoother, quieter. The result is not rebellion but compliance: efficient, bloodless, and hollow.

    When I started teaching college writing in the 1980s, this condition didn’t exist. Back then, I suffered from a different affliction: the conviction that I was destined to be the David Letterman of higher education—a twenty-five-year-old irony specialist armed with a chalkboard, a raised eyebrow, and impeccable timing. For a while, the bit landed. A well-placed joke could levitate a classroom. Students laughed. I mistook that laughter for learning. If I could entertain them, I told myself, I could teach them. For two decades, I confused engagement with applause and thought I was winning.

    That illusion began to crack around 2012. Phones lit up like votive candles. Attention splintered. Students weren’t bored; they were overclocked—curating identities, performing themselves, measuring worth in metrics. They ran hot: anxious, stimulated, desperate for recognition. Teaching became a cage match with the algorithm. Still, those students were alive. Distracted, yes—but capable of obsession, outrage, infatuation. Their pulses were fast. Their temperatures high.

    What we face now is colder. Around 2022, a different creature arrived. Not overstimulated, but under-responsive. Years of screen saturation, pandemic isolation, dopamine-dense apps, and frictionless AI assistance collapsed the internal reward system that once made discovery feel electric. This isn’t laziness. It’s learning-specific anhedonia. Students can assemble essays, follow scaffolds, and march through rubrics—but they do it like sleepwalkers. Curiosity is muted. Persistence is brittle. Critical thinking arrives pre-flattened, shrink-wrapped, and emotionally inert.

    The tragedy isn’t inefficiency; it’s emptiness. Today’s classrooms hum with quiet productivity and emotional frost—cognition without hunger, performance without investment, education stripped of its pulse.

    If there is a way forward, it won’t come from louder performances, cleverer prompts, or better optimization. Those are the same tools that bleached learning in the first place. Academic anhedonia cannot be cured with stimulation. It requires friction: slow reading that refuses to skim, sustained writing that will not autocomplete itself, intellectual solitude that feels mildly wrong, and work that denies the cheap dopamine hit of instant payoff. The cure is not novelty but depth; not entertainment but seriousness. Struggle isn’t a design flaw. It is the design.

    To interrupt academic anhedonia, I use an AI-resistant assignment that reintroduces cost, memory, and embodiment: The Transformative Moment. Students write 400–500 words about an experience that altered the trajectory of their lives. The assignment demands sensory precision—the one domain where AI reliably produces fluent oatmeal. It insists on transformation, which is what education is supposed to enact. And it drags students back into lived experience, away from the anesthetic glow of screens.

    I offer a model from my own life. When I was sixteen, visiting my recently divorced father, he asked what I planned to do after high school. I told him—without irony—that I intended to become a garbage man so I could finish work early and train at the gym all day. He laughed, then calmly informed me that I would go to college and join the professional class because I was far too vain to tell people at cocktail parties that I collected trash for a living. In that instant, I knew two things: my father knew me better than I knew myself, and my future had just been decided. I walked out of that conversation college-bound, whether I liked it or not.

    I tell them about a friend of mine, now a high school principal, who has been a vegetarian since his early twenties. While working at a deli during college, he watched a coworker carve into a bleeding slab of roast beef. In that moment—knife slicing, flesh yielding—something inside him snapped shut. He knew he would never eat meat again. He hasn’t. Transformation can be instantaneous. Conversion doesn’t always send a memo.

    My final example is a fireman I trained with at a gym in the 1970s. He was a recent finalist in the Mr. California bodybuilding contest: blond shag, broom-thick mustache, horn-rimmed glasses—Clark Kent with a bench press habit. One afternoon, after repping over three hundred pounds, he stood before the mirror, flexed his chest, and watched his muscles swell like they were auditioning for their own sitcom. “When I first saw Arnold,” he said, reverent, “I felt I was in the presence of the Lord. ‘There stands the Messiah,’ I said to myself. ‘There stands God Almighty come to bring good cheer to this world.’”

    He wasn’t speaking only for himself. He spoke for all of us. We wanted to be claimed by something larger than our small, awkward lives. Arnold was the messiah—the Pied Piper of Pecs—leading us toward the promised land of biceps, triceps, and quads capable of crushing produce.

    I assign The Transformative Moment because I want students to recreate an experience no machine can counterfeit. I want them to remember that education is not credential management but metamorphosis. And I want them to interrogate the conditions under which real change occurred in their lives—what they were paying attention to, what they risked, what it cost.

    Transformation—actual forward movement—is the antidote to anhedonia. And it cannot be outsourced.

  • Academic Anedonia: A Tale in 3 Parts

    Academic Anedonia: A Tale in 3 Parts

    Academic Anhedonia

    noun

    Academic Anhedonia is the condition in which students retain the ability to do school but lose the capacity to feel anything about it. Assignments are completed, boxes are checked, credentials are pursued, yet curiosity never lights up and satisfaction never arrives. Learning no longer produces pleasure, pride, or even frustration—just a flat neurological neutrality. These students aren’t rebellious or disengaged; they’re compliant and hollow, moving through coursework like factory testers pressing buttons to confirm the machine still turns on. Years of algorithmic overstimulation, pandemic detachment, and frictionless AI assistance have numbed the internal reward system that once made discovery feel electric. The result is a classroom full of quiet efficiency and emotional frost: cognition without appetite, performance without investment, education stripped of its pulse.

    ***

    I started teaching college writing in the 80s under the delusion that I was destined to be the David Letterman of higher education—a twenty-five-year-old ham with a chalkboard, half-professor and half–late-night stand-up. For a while, the act actually worked. A well-timed deadpan joke could mesmerize a room of eighteen-year-olds and soften their outrage when I saddled them with catastrophically ill-chosen books (Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler—a misfire so spectacular it deserves its own apology tour). My stories carried the class, and for decades I thought the laughter was evidence of learning. If I could entertain them, I told myself, I could teach them.

    Then 2012 hit like a change in atmospheric pressure. Engagement thinned. Phones glowed. Students behaved as though they were starring in their own prestige drama, and my classroom was merely a poorly lit set. I was no longer battling boredom—I was competing with the algorithm. This was the era of screen-mediated youth, the 2010–2021 cohort raised on the oxygen of performance. Their identities were curated in Instagram grids, maintained through Snapstreaks, and measured in TikTok microfame points. The students were not apathetic; they were overstimulated. Their emotional bandwidth was spent on self-presentation, comparison loops, and the endless scoreboard of online life. They were exhausted but wired, longing for authenticity yet addicted to applause. I felt my own attention-capture lose potency, but I still recognized those students. They were distracted, yes, but still alive.

    But in 2025, we face a darker beast: the academically anhedonic student. The screen-mediated generation ran hot; this one runs cold. Around 2022, a new condition surfaced—a collapse of the internal reward system that makes learning feel good, or at least worthwhile. Years of over-curation, pandemic detachment, frictionless AI answers, and dopamine-dense apps hollowed out the very circuits that spark curiosity. This isn’t laziness; it’s a neurological shrug. These students can perform the motions—fill in a template, complete a scaffold, assemble an essay like a flat-pack bookshelf—but they move through the work like sleepwalkers. Their curiosity is muted. Their persistence is brittle. Their critical thinking arrives pre-flattened. 

    My colleagues tell me their classrooms are filled with compliant but joyless learners checking boxes on their march toward a credential. The Before-Times students wrestled with ideas. The After-Times students drift through them without contact. It breaks our hearts because the contrast is stark: what was once noisy and performative has gone silent. Academic anhedonia names that silence—a crisis not of ability, but of feeling.

  • The Age of Academic Anhedonia

    The Age of Academic Anhedonia

    I started teaching college writing in the 80s under the delusion that I was destined to be the David Letterman of higher education—a twenty-five-year-old ham with a chalkboard, half-professor and half–late-night stand-up. For a while, the act actually worked. A well-timed deadpan joke could mesmerize a room of eighteen-year-olds and soften their outrage when I saddled them with catastrophically ill-chosen books (Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler—a misfire so spectacular it deserves its own apology tour). My stories carried the class, and for decades I thought the laughter was evidence of learning. If I could entertain them, I told myself, I could teach them.

    Then 2012 hit like a change in atmospheric pressure. Engagement thinned. Phones glowed. Students behaved as though they were starring in their own prestige drama, and my classroom was merely a poorly lit set. I was no longer battling boredom—I was competing with the algorithm. This was the era of screen-mediated youth, the 2010–2021 cohort raised on the oxygen of performance. Their identities were curated in Instagram grids, maintained through Snapstreaks, and measured in TikTok microfame points. The students were not apathetic; they were overstimulated. Their emotional bandwidth was spent on self-presentation, comparison loops, and the endless scoreboard of online life. They were exhausted but wired, longing for authenticity yet addicted to applause. I felt my own attention-capture lose potency, but I still recognized those students. They were distracted, yes, but still alive.

    But in 2025, we face a darker beast: the academically anhedonic student. The screen-mediated generation ran hot; this one runs cold. Around 2022, a new condition surfaced—a collapse of the internal reward system that makes learning feel good, or at least worthwhile. Years of over-curation, pandemic detachment, frictionless AI answers, and dopamine-dense apps hollowed out the very circuits that spark curiosity. This isn’t laziness; it’s a neurological shrug. These students can perform the motions—fill in a template, complete a scaffold, assemble an essay like a flat-pack bookshelf—but they move through the work like sleepwalkers. Their curiosity is muted. Their persistence is brittle. Their critical thinking arrives pre-flattened. 

    My colleagues tell me their classrooms are filled with compliant but joyless learners checking boxes on their march toward a credential. The Before-Times students wrestled with ideas. The After-Times students drift through them without contact. It breaks our hearts because the contrast is stark: what was once noisy and performative has gone silent. Academic anhedonia names that silence—a crisis not of ability, but of feeling.

  • My Fifth-Decade Crisis in the Writing Classroom

    My Fifth-Decade Crisis in the Writing Classroom

    My students lean on AI the way past generations leaned on CliffsNotes and caffeine. They’re open about it, too. They send me their drafts: the human version and the AI-polished version, side by side, like before-and-after photos from a grammatical spa treatment. The upside? Their sentences are cleaner, the typos are nearly extinct, and dangling modifiers have been hunted to the brink. The downside? Engagement has flatlined. When students outsource their thinking to a bot, they sever the emotional thread to the material.

    It’s not that they’re getting dumber—they’re just developing a different flavor of intelligence, one optimized for our algorithmic future. And I know they’ll need that skill. But in the process, they grow numb to the very themes I’m trying to teach: how fashion brands and fitness influencers weaponize FOMO; how adolescent passion differs from mature purpose; how Frederick Douglass built a heroic code to claw his way out of the Sunken Place of slavery.

    This numbness shows up in the classroom. They’re present but elsewhere, half-submerged in the glow of their phones and laptops. Yesterday I screened The Evolution of the Black Quarterback—a powerful account of Black athletes who faced death threats and racist abuse to claim their place in the NFL. While these stories unfolded onscreen, my student-athletes were scrolling through sports highlights, barely glancing at the actual documentary in front of them.

    I’m not the kind of instructor who polices technology like a hall monitor. Still, I’m no longer convinced I have the power to pull students out of their world and into mine. I once believed I did. Perhaps this is my own educational Sunken Place: the realization that attention capture has shifted the center of gravity, and I’m now orbiting the edges.

    I’ve been teaching writing full-time since the 1980s. For decades, I believed I could craft lessons—and a persona—that made an impact. Now, in my fifth decade, I’m not sure I can say that with the same certainty. The ground has moved, and I’m still learning how to stand on it.