Cinemorphosis

Tag: teaching

  • Mediocrity Amplification Effect

    Mediocrity Amplification Effect

    As you watch your classmates use AI for every corner of their lives—summarizing, annotating, drafting, thinking—you may feel a specific kind of demoralization set in. A sinking question forms: What does anything matter anymore? Is life now just a game of cheating the system efficiently? Is this where all the breathless hype about “the future” has landed us—an economy of shortcuts and plausible fraud?

    High school student Ashanty Rosario feels this acutely. She gives voice to the heartbreak in her essay “I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education,” a lament not about laziness but about loss. She doesn’t want to cheat. But the tools are everywhere, glowing like emergency exit signs in a burning building. Some temptations, she understands, are structural.

    Her Exhibit A is devastating. A classmate uses ChatGPT to annotate Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. These annotations—supposed proof of engaged reading—are nothing more than copy-paste edu-lard: high in calories, low in nutrition, and utterly empty of struggle. The form is there. The thinking is not.

    Rosario’s frustration echoes a moment from my own classroom. On the last day of the semester, one of my brightest students sat in my office and casually admitted that he uses ChatGPT to summarize all his reading. His father is a professor. He wakes up at five for soccer practice. He takes business calculus for fun. This is not a slacker. This is a time-management pragmatist surviving the twenty-first century. He reads the summaries, synthesizes the ideas, and writes excellent essays. Of course I wish he spent slow hours wrestling with books—but he is not living in 1954. He is living in a culture where time is scarce and AI functions as an oxygen mask.

    My daughters and their classmates face the same dilemma with Macbeth. Shakespeare’s language might as well be Martian for a generation raised on TikTok compression and dopamine drip-feeds. They watch film adaptations. They use AI to decode plot points so they can answer study questions without sounding like they slept through the Renaissance. Purists howl that this is cheating. But as a writing instructor, I suspect teachers benefit from students who at least know what’s happening—even if the knowledge arrives via chatbot. Expecting a fifteen-year-old to read Macbeth cold is like assigning tensor calculus to a preschooler. They haven’t done their priors. So AI becomes a prosthetic. A flotation device. A translation machine dropped into classrooms years overdue.

    Blaming AI for educational decline is tempting—but it’s also lazy. We live in a society where reading is a luxury good and the leisure class quietly guards the gates.

    In the 1970s, I graduated from a public high school with literacy skills so thin you could read the room through them. I took remedial English my freshman year of college. If I were a student today, dropped into 2025 with those same deficits, I would absolutely lean on AI just to keep my head above water. The difference now is scale. Today’s students aren’t just supplementing—they’re optimizing. They tell me this openly. Over ninety percent of my students use AI because their skills don’t match the workload and because everyone else is doing it. This isn’t a moral collapse. It’s an arms race of survival.

    Still, Rosario is right about the aftermath. “AI has softened the consequences of procrastination,” she writes, “and led many students to avoid doing any work at all. There is little intensity anymore.” When thinking becomes optional, students drift into algorithmic sleepwalking. They outsource cognition until they resemble NPCs in a glitching video game—avatars performing the motions of thought without the effort. My colleagues and I see it every semester: the fade-out, the disengagement, the slow zombification.

    Colleges are scrambling. Should we police AI with plagiarism detectors? Ban laptops? Force students to write essays in blue books under watchful eyes like parolees in a literary halfway house? Should we pretend the flood can be held back with a beach towel?

    Reading Rosario’s complaint about “cookie-cutter AI arguments,” I thought of my lone visit to Applebee’s in the early 2000s. The menu photos promised ambrosia. The food tasted like something engineered in a lab to be technically edible yet spiritually vacant. Applebee’s was AI before AI—an assembly line of flavorless simulacra. Humanity has always gravitated toward the easy, the prepackaged, the frictionless. AI didn’t invent mediocrity. It just handed it a megaphone.

    Rosario is no Applebee’s soul. She’s Michelin-level in a world eager to microwave Hot Pockets. Of course her heart sinks when classmates settle for fast-food literacy. I want to tell her this: had she been in high school in the 1970s, she would have witnessed the same hunger for shortcuts. The tools would be clumsier. The prose less polished. But the gravitational pull would be identical. The urge to bypass difficulty is not technological—it’s ancestral.

    What’s new is scale and speed. In the AI age, that ancient hunger is supercharged by what I call the Mediocrity Amplification Effect: the phenomenon by which AI accelerates and magnifies our long-standing temptation to dilute effort and settle for the minimally sufficient. Under this effect, tools meant to assist learning become accelerants of shortcut culture. Procrastination carries fewer consequences. Intensity drains away. Thinking becomes optional.

    This is not a new moral failure. It is an old one, industrialized—private compromise transformed into public default, mediocrity polished, normalized, and broadcast at scale. AI doesn’t make us lazy. It makes laziness louder.

  • AI High School Graduates Are Here—and They’re Better Cheaters Than We Are Teachers

    AI High School Graduates Are Here—and They’re Better Cheaters Than We Are Teachers

    Lila Shroff argues that education has entered its Wild West phase in her essay “The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started,” and she’s right in the way that makes administrators nervous and instructors tired. Our incoming college students are not stumbling innocents. They are veterans of four full years of AI high school. They no longer dabble in crude copy-and-paste plagiarism. That’s antique behavior. Today’s students stitch together outputs from multiple AI models, then instruct the chatbot to scuff the prose with a few grammatical missteps so it smells faintly human and slips past detection software. This is not cheating as shortcut; it is cheating as workflow optimization.

    Meanwhile, high school teachers may be congratulating themselves for assigning Shakespeare, Keats, and Dostoevsky, but many are willfully ignoring the obvious. Students are using AI constantly—for summaries, study guides, feedback, and comprehension scaffolding. AI is CliffsNotes on growth hormones, and pretending otherwise is an exercise in institutional denial.

    Educators, of course, are not standing outside the saloon wagging a finger. They are inside, ordering drinks. Shroff notes that teachers now use AI to design assignments, align curriculum to standards, grade against rubrics, and complete the paperwork that keeps schools legally hydrated. Nearly a third of K–12 teachers reported weekly AI use last year, and that number has only climbed as profession-specific tools like MagicSchool AI churn out rubrics, worksheets, and report-card comments on demand. The teacher as craftsman is quietly becoming the teacher as editor.

    AI’s grip tightens most aggressively where schools are already bleeding resources. In districts short on tutors and counselors, AI steps in as a substitute for services that were never funded in the first place. It is not reform; it is triage. And once institutions get a taste of saving money by not hiring tutors and counselors, it is naïve to think that teaching positions will remain untouchable. Cost-saving rarely stops at the first ethical boundary it crosses.

    That is why this feels like the Wild West. There is no shared map. Some schools welcome AI like a messiah. Others quarantine it like a contagious disease. Many simply shrug and admit they are baffled. Policy is reactive, inconsistent, and often written by people who do not understand the technology well enough to regulate it intelligently.

    I see the consequences weekly in my college classroom. I read plenty of AI slop—essays with perfect grammar and no pulse, paragraphs that gesture toward ideas they never quite touch. Some students have clearly checked out, outsourcing not just sentences but thinking itself. And yet AI is also an undeniable equalizer. Students emerging from underfunded schools with sixth-grade literacy levels are submitting essays with clean syntax and logical structure. They are using AI to outline arguments, test thesis ideas, and stabilize skills they were never taught. The tool giveth and the tool holloweth out.

    People like to invoke “too big to fail,” but the analogy is incomplete. We do not know which AI—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or some yet-unseen contender—will dominate. What we do know is that AI is already embedded in education, culture, and the economy. There is no reversing this process. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube, no matter how sternly we lecture it.

    So I tell my students the only honest thing left to say: we don’t know what we’re doing. Our roles are unsettled. Our identities are unstable. We are feeling our way through a dark cave without a map and without guarantees. There may be light ahead, or there may not. The only sane posture is humility—paired with curiosity, caution, and a sober gratitude that even a force this disruptive may yield benefits we are not yet wise enough to recognize.

  • The Rotator Cuff, the Honda Dealership, and the Human Soul

    The Rotator Cuff, the Honda Dealership, and the Human Soul

    Life has a way of mocking our plans. You stride in with a neat blueprint, and the universe responds by flinging marbles under your feet. My shoulder rehab, for instance, was supposed to be a disciplined, daily ritual: the holy grail of recovering from a torn rotator cuff. Instead, after one enthusiastic session, both shoulders flared with the kind of throbbing soreness reserved for muscles resurrected from the dead (though after walking home from Honda, it occurred to me that my right shoulder soreness is probably the result of a tetanus shot). So much for the doctor’s handouts of broomstick rotations and wall flexions. Today, the new fitness plan is modest: drop off the Honda for service, walk two miles home, and declare that my workout. Tomorrow: to be determined by the whims of my tendons and sore muscles.

    Teaching is no different. I’ve written my entire Spring 2026 curriculum, but then I read about humanities professor Alan Jacobs—our pedagogical monk—who has ditched computers entirely. Students handwrite every assignment in composition books; they read photocopied essays with wide margins, scribbling annotations in ink. According to Jacobs, with screens removed and the “LLM demons” exorcised, students rediscover themselves as human beings. They think again. They care again. I can see the appeal. They’re no longer NPCs feeding essays into the AI maw.

    But then I remembered who I am. I’m not a parchment-and-fountain-pen professor any more than I’m a pure vegan. I am a creature of convenience, pragmatism, and modern constraints. My students live in a world of laptops, apps, and algorithms; teaching them only quills and notebooks would be like handing a medieval knight a lightsaber and insisting he fight with a broomstick. I will honor authenticity another way—through the power of my prompts, the relevance of my themes, and the personal narratives that force students to confront their own thoughts rather than outsource them. My job is to balance the human soul with the tools of the age, not to bury myself—and my students—in nostalgia cosplay.

  • Has AI Broken Education—or Did We Break It First?

    Has AI Broken Education—or Did We Break It First?

    Argumentative Essay Prompt: AI, Education, and the Future of Human Thinking (1,700 words)

    Artificial intelligence has entered classrooms, study sessions, and homework routines with overwhelming speed. Some commentators argue that this shift is not just disruptive but disastrous. Ashanty Rosario, a high school student, warns in “I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education” that AI encourages passivity, de-skills students, and replaces authentic learning with the illusion of competence. Lila Shroff, in “The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started,” argues that teachers and institutions are unprepared, leaving students to navigate a digital transformation with no guardrails. Damon Beres claims in “AI Has Broken High School and College” that classrooms are devolving into soulless content factories in which students outsource both thought and identity. These writers paint a bleak picture: AI is not just a tool—it is a force accelerating the decay of intellectual life.

    Other commentators take a different approach. Ian Bogost’s “College Students Have Already Changed Forever” argues that the real transformation happened long before AI—students have already become transactional, disengaged, and alienated, and AI simply exposes a preexisting wound. Meanwhile, Tyler Austin Harper offers two counterpoints: in “The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI,” he insists that institutions must rethink how assignments function in the age of automation; and in “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College,” he suggests that AI could amplify human learning if courses are redesigned to reward original thinking, personal insight, and intellectual ambition rather than formulaic output.

    In a 1,700-word argumentative essay, defend, refute, or complicate the claim that AI is fundamentally damaging education. Your essay must:

    • Take a clear position on whether AI erodes learning, enhances it, or transforms it in ways that require new pedagogical strategies.
    • Analyze how Rosario, Shroff, and Beres frame the dangers of AI for intellectual development, motivation, and classroom culture.
    • Compare their views with Bogost and Harper, who argue that education itself—not AI—is the root of the crisis, or that educators must adapt rather than resist.
    • Include a counterargument–rebuttal section that addresses the strongest argument you disagree with.
    • Use at least four credible sources in MLA format, including at least three of the essays listed above.

    Your goal is not to summarize the articles but to evaluate what they reveal about the future of learning: Is AI the villain, the scapegoat, or a tool we have not yet learned to use wisely?

  • Does AI Destroy or Redefine Learning?

    Does AI Destroy or Redefine Learning?

    Argumentative Essay Prompt: The Effects of AI on Education (1,700 words)

    Artificial intelligence has raised alarm bells in education. Critics argue that students now rely so heavily on AI tools that they are becoming users rather than thinkers—outsourcing curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving to machines. In this view, the classroom is slowly deteriorating into a culture of passivity, distraction, and what some call a form of “communal stupidity.”

    In his Atlantic essay “My Students Use AI. So What?” linguist and educator John McWhorter challenges this narrative. Instead of treating AI as a threat to intelligence, he examines the everyday media consumption of his tween daughters. They spend little time reading traditional books, yet their time online exposes them to sophisticated humor, stylized language, and clever cultural references. Rather than dulling their minds, McWhorter argues, certain forms of media sharpen them—and occasionally reach the level of genuine artistic expression.

    McWhorter anticipates objections. Books demand imagination, concentration, and patience. He does not deny this. But he asks whether we have elevated books into unquestioned sacred objects. Human creativity has always existed in visual, auditory, and performative arts—not exclusively on the printed page.

    Like many educators, McWhorter also acknowledges that schooling must adapt. Just as no teacher today would demand students calculate square roots without a calculator, he recognizes that assigning a formulaic five-paragraph essay invites AI to automate it. Teaching must evolve, not retreat. He concludes that educators and parents must create new forms of engagement that work within the technological environment students actually inhabit.

    Is McWhorter persuasive? In a 1,700-word argumentative essay, defend, refute, or complicate his central claim that AI is not inherently corrosive to thinking, and that education must evolve rather than resist technological realities. Your essay should:
    • Make a clear, debatable thesis about AI’s influence on learning, creativity, and critical thinking.
    • Analyze how McWhorter defines intelligence, skill, and engagement in digital environments.
    • Include a counterargument–rebuttal section in which you address why some technologies may be so disruptive that adapting to them becomes impossible—or whether that fear misunderstands how students actually learn.
    • Use evidence from McWhorter and at least two additional credible sources.
    • Include a Works Cited page in MLA format with at least four sources total.

    Your goal is not to simply summarize McWhorter, but to weigh his claims against reality. Does AI open new modes of literacy, or does it train us into passive consumption? What does responsible adaptation look like, and where do we draw the line between embracing tools and surrendering agency?

    Building Block 1: Introduction Paragraph:

    Write a 300-word paragraph describing a non-book activity—such as a specific YouTube channel, a TikTok creator, an online gaming stream, or a subreddit—that entertains you while also requiring real engagement and intellectual effort. Do not speak in broad generalities; focus on one example. Describe what drew you to that content and what makes it more than passive consumption. If you choose a subreddit, explain how it operates: Do members debate technical details, challenge arguments, post layered memes that reference politics or philosophy, or analyze social behavior that demands you understand context and nuance? If you choose a video or stream, describe how its pacing, humor, visual cues, or language force you to track patterns, notice subtle callbacks, or recognize sarcasm and satire. Show how your brain works to interpret signals, anticipate moves, decode cultural references, or evaluate whether the creator is being sincere, ironic, or manipulative. Explain how this activity cultivates cognitive skills—pattern recognition, strategic thinking, language sensitivity, humor literacy, or cultural analysis—that are not identical to reading but still intellectually substantial. Then connect your experience to John McWhorter’s argument in “My Students Use AI. So What?” by explaining how your engagement challenges the assumption that screen-based media turns young people into passive consumers. McWhorter claims that digital content can sharpen minds by exposing viewers to stylized language, comedic timing, and creative expression; show how your chosen activity illustrates (or complicates) this point. Conclude by reflecting on whether the skills you are developing—whether from decoding layered Reddit discussions or following complex video essays—are simply different from the skills cultivated by books, or whether they offer alternative paths to intelligence that schools and parents should take seriously.

    Building Block 2: Conclusion

    Write a 250-word conclusion in which you step back from your argument and explain what your thesis reveals about the broader social implications of online entertainment. Do not summarize your paper. Instead, reflect on how your analysis has changed the way you think about digital media and your own habits as a viewer, gamer, or participant. Explain how your chosen example—whether a subreddit, a content creator, a gaming channel, or another digital space—demonstrates that online entertainment is not automatically a form of distraction or intellectual decay. Discuss how interacting with this media has trained you to interpret tone, decode humor or irony, follow complex narratives, or understand cultural signals that are easy to miss if you are not paying attention. Then consider what this means for society: If students are learning language, timing, persuasion, and nuance in digital environments, how should teachers, parents, and institutions respond? Should they continue to treat online entertainment as a threat to literacy, or as an alternate path to it? Draw a connection between your growth as a thinker and the larger question of where intelligence is cultivated in the 21st century. End your paragraph with a reflection on how your relationship to digital media has changed: Do you now view certain forms of online entertainment as trivial distractions, or as unexpected arenas where people practice rhetorical agility, cultural awareness, and cognitive skill?

  • 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.

  • The Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed

    The Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed

    In the summer of 2025, the English Chair—Steve, a mild-mannered, hyper-competent saint of a man—sent me an email that sounded innocuous enough. Would I, he asked, teach a freshman writing course for student-athletes? It would meet two mornings a week, two hours a session. The rest of my load would stay online. I should have known from the soft tone of his message that this was no ordinary assignment. This was a CoLab, an experimental hybrid of academic optimism and administrative wishcasting.

    The idea was elegant on paper: gather athletes into one class, surround them with counselors and coaches, raise retention rates, and call it innovation. Morale would soar. Grades would climb. The athletes would have a “safe space,” a phrase that always sounds like a promise from someone who’s never had reality punch their teeth in. Through the magic of cross-departmental communication, we’d form a “deep network of student support.” It all sounded like a TED Talk waiting to happen.

    Morning classes weren’t my preference. I usually reserved that time for my kettlebell ritual—my secular liturgy of iron and sweat—but I said yes without hesitation. Steve had earned my respect long ago. A decade earlier, we’d bonded over Dale Allison’s Night Comes, marveling at its lucidity on the afterlife. You don’t forget someone who reads eschatology with humility and enthusiasm. So when Steve asked, it felt less like a request than a summons.

    And yes, I’ll admit it: the offer flattered me. Steve knew my past as an Olympic weightlifter, the remnant coach swagger in my stride was visible even at sixty-three. I imagined myself the perfect fit—a grizzled academic with gym cred, able to command respect from linemen and linebackers. I said yes with gusto, convinced I was not just teaching a class but leading a mission.

    Soon enough, the flattery metastasized into full-blown delusion. I stalked the campus like a self-appointed messiah of pedagogy, convinced destiny had personally cc’d me on its latest memo. To anyone within earshot, I announced my divine assignment: to pilot a revolutionary experiment that would fuse intellect and biceps into one enlightened organism. I fancied myself the missing link between Socrates and Schwarzenegger—a professor forged in iron, sent to rescue education from the sterile clutches of the AI Age. My “muscular, roll-up-your-sleeves” teaching style, I told myself, would be a sweaty rebuke to all that was algorithmic, bloodless, and bland.

    The problem with self-congratulation is that it only boosts performance in the imagination. It blunts the discipline of preparation and tricks you into confusing adrenaline for authority. I wasn’t an educational pioneer—I was a man on a dopamine binge, inhaling the exhaust of my own hype. Beneath the swagger, there was no scholarship, no rigor, no plan—just the hollow hum of self-belief. I hadn’t earned a thing. Until I actually taught the class and produced results, my so-called innovation was vaporware. I was a loudmouth in faculty khakis, mistaking vanity for vocation. Until I delivered the goods, I wasn’t a trailblazer—I was the Flim-flam Man of Higher Ed, peddling inspiration on credit.

    Forgive me for being so hard on myself, but after thirty-eight years of full-time college teaching, I’ve earned the right to doubt my own effectiveness. I’ve sat in the back of other instructors’ classrooms during evaluations, watching them conduct symphonies of group discussions and peer-review sessions with the grace of social alchemists. Their students collaborate, laugh, and somehow stay on task. Mine? The moment I try anything resembling a workshop, it devolves into chatter about weekend plans, fantasy football, or the ethics of tipping baristas. A few students slink out early as if the assignment violated parole. I sit there afterward, deflated, convinced I’m the pedagogical equivalent of a restaurant that can’t get anyone to stay for dessert.

    I’ve been to professional development seminars. I’ve heard the gospel of “increasing engagement” and “active learning.” I even take notes—real ones, not the doodles of a man pretending to care. Yet I never manage to replicate their magic. Perhaps it’s because I’ve leaned too heavily on my teaching persona, the wisecracking moralist who turns outrage into a stand-up routine. My students laugh; I bask in the glow of my own wit. Then I drive home replaying the greatest hits—those sarcastic riffs that landed just right—while avoiding the inconvenient truth: humor is a sugar high. It keeps the crowd awake, but it doesn’t build muscle. Even if I’m half as funny as I think I am, comedy can easily become a sedative—a way to distract myself from the harder work of improvement.

    Measuring effectiveness in teaching is its own farce. If I sold cars, I’d know by the end of the quarter whether I was good at it. If I ran a business, profit margins would tell the story. But academia? It’s all smoke and mirrors. We talk about “retention” and “Student Learning Outcomes,” but everyone knows the game is rigged. The easiest graders pull the highest retention numbers. And when “learning outcomes” are massaged to ensure success, the data becomes a self-congratulatory illusion—a bureaucratic circle jerk masquerading as accountability.

    The current fetish is “engagement,” a buzzword that’s supposed to fix everything. We’re told to gamify, scaffold, diversify, digitize—anything to keep students from drifting into their screens. But engagement itself has become impossible to measure; it’s a ghost we chase through PowerPoint slides. My colleagues, battle-scarred veterans of equal or greater tenure, tell me engagement has fallen off a cliff. Screens have rewired attention spans, and a culture that prizes self-esteem over rigor has made deep learning feel oppressive. Asking students to revise an essay is now a microaggression.

    So yes, I question my value as an instructor. I prepare obsessively, dive deep into my essay topics, and let my passion show—because I know that if I don’t care, the students won’t either. But too often, my enthusiasm earns me smirks. To many of my students, I’m just an eccentric goofy man who takes this writing thing way too seriously. Their goal is simple: pass the class with minimal friction. The more I push them to care, the more resistance I meet, until the whole enterprise starts to feel like an arm-wrestling match.

    Until I find a cure for this malaise—a magic wand, a new pedagogy, or divine intervention—I remain skeptical of my own worth in the classroom. I do my best, but some days that feels like shouting into a void lined with smartphones. So yes, I’ll say it again for the record: I am the Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed, hawking sincerity in an age that rewards performance.

  • The No Consequences Era of Education

    The No Consequences Era of Education

    It’s been a bruising semester. I’m teaching a class full of student-athletes—big personalities, bigger social circles. I like them; I even feel protective of them. But they’re driving me halfway to madness. They sit in tight cliques, chattering through lectures like it’s a locker room between drills. Every class, I play the same game of whack-a-murmur: redirect, refocus, remind them that the material matters for their essays. I promise them mercy—“just give me 30 minutes of focus before we watch the documentary or workshop your drafts”—but my voice competes with the hum of conversation and the holy glow of smartphones.

    The phones are the true sirens of the classroom—scrolling, snapping, texting, attention atomized into pixels. Maybe it’s my fault for not collecting them in a basket like contraband. I thought I was teaching adults. I thought athletes, of all people, would bring discipline and drive. Instead, I’ve got a team that treats class like study hall with Wi-Fi. My essay topics that have created engagement in past semesters—like Jordan Peele’s Sunken Place—barely register. The irony: I’m showing them the metaphor for psychological paralysis, and half the room is literally sinking into their screens.

    After thirty years of teaching, this is the hardest semester I’ve had. I kept telling myself, Five more weeks and the storm will pass. Next semester, you’ll have your groove back. Today I spoke with a colleague who teaches the same class to the general population—same disengagement, same cell phones, same glazed eyes. He added one more grim diagnosis: the rise of fragility. When he points out errors, missing citations, too much AI-speak, or low effort, students protest that his feedback “hurts their feelings.” They’re not defiant—they’re delicate. Consequences have become cruelty.

    That word—consequences—haunted me as I walked to class. I thought about my own twin daughters at their highly rated high school, where late work flows freely, “self-esteem” trumps rigor, and parental complaints terrify administrators more than failing grades. It hit me: this isn’t an athlete problem—it’s a generational shift. The No Consequences Era has arrived. Students no longer fear failure; they resent it. And the tragedy isn’t that they can’t handle criticism—it’s that they’ve never been forced to build the muscle for it.

  • Will Online Education Expose the Class Divide?

    Will Online Education Expose the Class Divide?

    I began teaching online composition in March 2020, when the world suddenly went remote. Like everyone else, I adapted out of necessity, not preference. Since then, I’ve taught both online and face-to-face courses, and the contrast has been eye-opening. I never realized how physically demanding in-person teaching was until I experienced the frictionless ease of the online classroom. Behind the Canvas wall, I am a disembodied voice, orchestrating discussion like the Wizard of Oz. In person, I am on stage—reacting, performing, fielding energy and questions in real time. It is exhilarating and exhausting, proof that teaching in the flesh demands more than intellect; it requires stamina.

    Today, I discussed this with a friend and colleague nearing seventy, a man who has been teaching full-time for nearly forty years. Despite the fatigue of in-person instruction, he refuses to teach online. His reasoning is both moral and practical. He doesn’t like the lower pass and retention rates of online classes, but his deeper concern is social. “The more we move online,” he told me, “the worse the class divide gets. Only rich students will take face-to-face classes and get a real education. Poor students—working long hours and pinching gas money—will settle for online. Don’t you see, McMahon? It’s an equity issue.”

    He had a point. “So what you’re saying,” I replied, “is that the wealthy can afford genuine engagement—real classrooms, real conversation—while online education offers a simulation of that experience for everyone else.” I paused, thinking about my own students. “But it’s not just an equity issue,” I added. “It’s an engagement issue. We talk endlessly about ‘student engagement’ in online learning, but that word is often misplaced. Many students choose online classes precisely to disengage. They’re working parents, caretakers, exhausted employees. They don’t want a full immersion—they want survival. They want the credential, not the communion.”

    Later that morning, I brought this conversation to my freshman composition class. When I asked if they wanted “student engagement” in their online courses, they laughed. “Hell no,” one said. “It’s like traffic school—you just get through it.” Another, a bright fire science major, confessed that after eight weeks of an online class, she’d learned “absolutely nothing.” Their expectations were low, and they knew it. Online education, for them, was not a journey of discovery but an obstacle course—something endured, not experienced. Still, as someone who teaches writing online, I can’t accept that entirely. I want my courses to be navigable and meaningful—to raise enduring questions that linger beyond the semester. Like Dorothy on the yellow brick road, I want students to follow a clear path, one step at a time, until they reach their own version of Oz. And while I know online learning will never replicate the immediacy of face-to-face teaching, I don’t think it should. Each has its own logic, its own measure of success. Forcing one to imitate the other would only flatten them both.