Why Johnny is failing calc II
My new NYT essay looks for a way past the breakdown in college students' learning
I have a new essay on education that’s the lead article of this week’s New York Times Sunday Review. It’s about a breakdown in learning that many college instructors have seen this past academic year, when classes had mostly returned to in-person. Like many other instructors, I saw major drop-offs in attendance, participation, on-time assignments, and quality of work.
Student disengagement is a problem for everyone, because everyone depends on well-educated people. College prepares students for socially essential careers — including as engineers and nurses — and to be citizens who bring high-level intellectual habits to bear on big societal problems, from climate change to the next political crisis. On a more fundamental level it also prepares many students to be responsible adults: to set goals and figure out what help they need to attain them.
Higher education is now at a turning point. The accommodations for the pandemic can either end or be made permanent. The task won’t be easy, but universities need to help students rebuild their ability to learn. And to do that, everyone involved — students, faculties, administrators and the public at large — must insist on in-person classes and high expectations for fall 2022 and beyond.
Judging from the comments on the essay, the reactions on social media, and the emails I’m receiving, the essay is sparking much-needed conversation about what higher education ought to look like in the Covid-vaccine era. I hope you’ll read it.
This is the second time in eight months something I’ve written made the cover of the Sunday Review, something that just a year ago I would not have imagined happening even once. (Here’s the previous essay, on how to rethink work’s place in our lives after Covid disrupted them.)
I’m grateful that the Times’s opinion editors believe in my work, and I’m grateful for their diligent effort and that of their fact-checkers and designers.
I also want to thank some friends who helped put me in touch with people at UT-Arlington and the University of Dallas. I could not have done the reporting I did without them.
In the essay, I imply that the University of Dallas, a small, conservative Catholic college, made the right move by returning to fully in-person classes (but with other activities strictly curtailed) in fall 2020, well before most other universities did. UD took a risk, and in retrospect, it seems to have panned out. From what I can tell, UD didn’t have an especially high rate of Covid infection, but I think it had better learning outcomes. As we can now see, the universities that kept classes remote in 2020-21 took a risk, too, and the learning breakdown is a consequence.
I should say, I didn’t want to go back to in-person classes in fall 2020; I didn’t think it would be safe. Many universities went fully remote that semester. The one university where I was teaching adopted the worst of all options: a “hyflex” model whereby half of the students attended class in-person and half Zoomed into the class meeting. The idea was that the students would be in-person on a rotating schedule.
A couple weeks into the semester, I came to the classroom and no one was there. All the students were on Zoom. Eventually, I decided to hold all our meetings via Zoom. For the rest of the semester, I tried in vain to get any discussion going.
The next semester, also slated to be hyflex, a majority of the students told me they would prefer to be in person every day. I said that was fine with me, so long as we didn’t exceed the social-distance capacity of the classroom. It never became an issue, because, in fact, only two or three students ever came to the in-person sessions. I tried to teach both them and the larger number who were essentially black boxes on Zoom. Occasionally, a student would have their camera on and clearly be at the beach (i.e., hundreds or thousands of miles away). Other times, it was clear that no one was actually on the other side of the camera; I would set up breakout rooms, and a couple of students would just never join.
I believe that students meant it when they said they wanted to have classes in person. My students this semester told me as much. But when students don’t strictly have to attend class in person, many of them don’t. If they can attend remotely, they might, but they might not really engage. If they can watch a recording of the class later, they might tell themselves they’ll watch it later, but in fact, most won’t.
The reason for this state of affairs is not, I think, that the students are bad or lazy. At least, they’re no worse or lazier than the typical person, because the typical person does exactly the same thing in the same situation. How many Zoom meetings have I been barely present for? Or attended camera-off, so I could do something else at the same time? How many online events have I signed up for, then skipped, telling myself I’d watch the recording later? How many of those recordings did I actually watch?
The argument of the essay is not simply that in-person education is better than online. I think that’s generally true, but I know it’s possible to learn remotely and even asynchronously (ahem, see below). Indeed, I have done it.
The argument is, rather, that once someone gets used to the casual, disconnected approach to learning that Zoom U. allowed, then they will have a very hard time building the habits they’ll need to learn effectively in person. This is especially true if the student is on the younger side. The older students I spoke to for the article had the discipline, motivation, and self-knowledge it takes to do fine remotely. Even so, as UTA student Ahlam Atallah told me, when she had the option to attend her sociology class remotely this past semester, she went in person anyway, because she knew she wouldn’t actually watch the recording later.
The problem isn’t “kids these days.” It’s human nature. And the solution to the problem ought to capitalize on the best of human nature: the way we build habits that then become hard to break, the fact that relationships make it easier to do difficult things.
In fall 2021, the semester I describe in the opening paragraphs of my essay, I read this great op-ed by Tyler Burkhardt in the UT-Dallas campus newspaper that urged his fellow students to “re-learn how to learn” by embracing in-person classes. Burkhardt’s essay is excellent: clear, well-sourced, and empathetic. It helped convince me the problem wasn’t just with me, that something was different about how students were approaching their classes. He seemed at the time to be a lone voice pushing against a tide that was calling for remote learning options to persist indefinitely. And he was right.
There is much more to say on this topic, so I may once again post this newsletter a bit more often in the coming weeks.
My spiritual nonfiction writing class — indeed, it will be online and asynchronous, playing out over eight weeks — begins on Monday. There are still a few spots left! For more info, look here, or just respond to this message.