WHY I STOPPED TEACHING
I Couldn't "Phone It In."
There is something different about this Labor Day weekend for me. Since 2013, when I was 63, I have been teaching one or two classes every semester at St. John's University in Queens, NY. They have been in both the Journalism and English departments. I cherished those classes, and I liked my students so much that somewhere in the middle years I had an existential crisis: I told one of my colleagues I just didn't love my students that semester. I figured if I didn't love my students, there was something wrong with me.
It was wonderful to develop a new skill, or art, or career, at that age: I found a calling for which I was unaccountably well suited. St. John's let me be myself, execute the curricula as I saw fit, encouraged my "performance art" method of teaching and talking and digressing. I didn't like the expensive textbook racket, so I taught, at first, from my writing career and life experiences, even as it sometimes took students a little time to figure out who Professor Robins was. He was this guy who might decide to shake up a sleepy class with Funkadelic's "One Nation Under a Groove" and lead a discussion over whether it should be our new a national anthem.
But as an adjunct (freelancer), I had no contract, no pension for sure. I hope subscriptions can take up some of the evaporated income.
I decided to stop teaching at the end of the last semester, in May 2024. Just not accept any classes for fall 2024, which would have started just before this weekend, or tomorrow. Why, you ask? I'd loved my job for almost all of the last 12 years. But something had changed the last year or two, aside from the disruptions and emotional stress of the Covid years, during which I gave it all I could, and left nothing off the field.
When my daughters were younger and they begged for one more story before bedtime, and we just didn't have it in us, we had a routine. "OK. One more story."
The story was: "Once upon a time...The end!"
As for teaching: I could tell you a long story, long as Schererezade. But it came down to one thing: The phones. The end.
I read an entertaining but appalling story in the Times today (I know, there are many appalling stories in the Times these days), an op-ed by a woman who paid her daughter $100 to read a book for pleasure. To get her away from her phone. The author, Mirielle Silcoff, is an accomplished author and critic based in Montreal. So before you get excited about Silcoff spending a fortune on a bribe, today $100 Canadian dollars is worth less than $75 U.S. dollars, so no need to get overwrought. The idea was to get the daughter to read a book for pleasure within 30 days. She describes her daughter before and after the phone: Going from an enthusiastic kid open to surprise and pleasure, to "a monosyllabic blanket slug who wanted only to stay in her room with the blinds down, door closed, under a duvet."
The daughter won the bet by finishing the book in six days: "The Summer I Turned Pretty," by Jenny Han, which she'd seen and liked on Amazon Prime. But okay, point made. I had a similar experience with one of my students when I was teaching the core speech class Public Speaking, to entering students. A student sat down in front of me at the beginning of class, reading a book: A novel by the very popular author Colleen Hoover, the romance and young adult author, whose work I didn't recognize from the curriculum.
"Are you reading that for a class?" I asked.
"No," said.
"So you're reading it for..." I was not used to using this word for students and reading, but I blurted it out anyway. "For pleasure?"
"Yes," she said.
I didn't want to overact, by pretending to faint, but I was so pleased that I said: "You have permission to continue reading, for the entire class, as long as you're enjoying the book."
I taught another class for a few semesters in which enjoyable fiction was often assigned: Literature, Film, and the Visual Arts. It met once a week, every Wednesday, from roughly 10:30 AM to 1:30 PM: Three hours, 27 students, in a long undistinguished room without special audio-visual equipment. I was generous with break time at noon for lunch, which they could bring back to their desks. After the first few classes, I knew that the A students were sitting in the front rows, the B students sat in the middle rows, and those who could not give a damn but expected A's anyway huddled in the back rows, with their laptops open and their phones at the ready. I asked one ambitious but socially immature student to move up a few rows so he could be more successful in class. He declined, saying he'd rather be in the back row sitting next to his could-not-give-a-damn buddy. This kid got a good grade, but he is never going to get a recommendation from me, which is something students don't understand: an enthusiastic letter from a former professor is worth more than your GPA to a future employer or grad school admissions office. And phone-heads don't get recommendations.
But they sure can stink up a class. You would think that a class called Literature, Film, and the Visual Arts would attract people interested in reading books (aka "Literature"), but they did not; watching movies (not that much); and watching short films (aka the visual arts). No. It was like baseball games during the 60-game 2020 season, when Covid restrictions kept the stands empty. Some ballparks put up cardboard cutouts of people in the seats. That's what this class was like, speaking to cardboard cutouts, engaged with their phones.
I assigned a book of Don DeLillo short stories, some just a few pages long, even though we were going to watch the Noah Baumbach movie of DeLillo's "White Noise." I thought "White Noise," the book, might be too long for their attention spans. As it turns out, the "White Noise" movie was not something they identified with, even with me dancing at the front of the class to the film's coda, a supermarket scene choreographed to the LCD Soundsystem's "New Body Rhumba." I offered the students to get up and dance along. I had zero takers.
But I wanted to give them a taste of the historic event from the middle of the 20th century which DeLillo uses to set up his long masterpiece, Underworld. That was the 1951 National League pennant final playoff game, the three game series tied at one apiece, between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, played at the Giants' Harlem home, the Polo Grounds. DeLillo deliciously begins with Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and celebrity saloon keeper Toots Shor at the game. There wasn't much TV then: Bobby Thomson's miracle walk-off home run off the Dodgers' relief pitcher Ralph Branca was famous for the Russ Hodges radio voice of the Giants repeating, "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant." I know these words pain my friends who were Dodgers fans to this day. I was not yet two years old.
We live in different days of miracle and wonder. We have You Tube, on which I found the newsreel highlight of the game's dramatic finish, one of those collections of news-of-the-week reels that used to precede the main attraction in movie theaters. I set up the video of the newsreel, about two minutes long. I told them the relevant background. I shut the lights. I started the newsreel, which shaped my life, as a New York Giants fan who had seen Willie Mays play in the Polo Grounds. I looked at the class: No one was watching the screen. It was just two minutes! The 27 heads were looking down at the phone. I stopped the video, outraged. There was an hour left in class. I threw everybody out. I wasn't going to teach students who didn't want to learn. Class over.
I did the same thing with my Public Speaking class that semester, though there were 15 minutes or so left in class. I thought everyone in the class should pick a song that they wanted to talk about. They'd come to the podium, introduce the song, play the You Tube video, and chat for a few minutes. By the time everyone was finished (this had stretched over two days), we had plenty of time left, so I said I would choose a song and talk about it. I picked Bob Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." I was already kicking around some ideas about how I would write about this song in my Substack, and I wanted to play it out in front of an audience.
But of course, I needed to talk about who Bob Dylan was for a minute or two. I might as well have been speaking about Westbrook Pegler, for all they knew. I put on the song, turned down the lights, and again, all eyes were on their phones. "Out!" I said. "Get out!" "Enjoy your phones if you don't want to learn." They took it a little harder than the Lit sutdents: They were mostly freshman. Two stayed to apologize, which I thought showed some character.
There was always the occasional student who could not close their laptop or turn off their device because of some advanced neurological progression of phone addiction. One was a nice young man who sometimes even participated in class, which in itself was a shock. But I once insisted he put away his phone. I really made an issue out of it. Within seconds, his fingers, especially his thumbs, were moving in the air: He was "air texting," he could not stop his fingers from moving even without the phone in his hand. I became worried, but within moments the actual phone was back in his hands. I said nothing: His phone was a power greater than himself. Without it was like watching a person twitch with a phantom limb.
I saw the problem getting worse rather than getting better. Even the aces in my required Craft of Interviewing class for journalism majors regret the time they waste on Tik Tok. On their phones. They knew it was unsatisfying, a joyless buzz. I don't even know if I can download Tik Tok to my phone, it has such an old OS. In fact, this weekend I thought about getting a new iPhone. It's way overdue, and there is no way to live without one. But their ubiquity and addictiveness have made teaching harder than it ever was, and I've got a one year old grandson who I've got to fend off, keeping his tiny, grasping fingers away from my phone.
I always banned phones and laptops in my classes, which ran from 2000 to 2019. No problem in seminars. In lecture classes at the New School, Parsons students would congregate in the back, out of my sight (the 100 student class fulfilled a requirement so people with no interest took it), and design clothes on their computers—but never at Cal. I regularly in sat in on TA’s sessions for the New School lecture class, where I didn’t make the rules and never said anything, and never saw a device.
When people claimed medical exemptions I said fine and ignored them. They’d stop coming and either drop out or in rare cases fail. I felt bad about that: as a student I passed any number of classes I never attended, usually when someone said, ‘What are you writing the final paper on?’ And I’d say, ‘When’s it due?’ And they’d say, ‘Tomorrow,’ and I’d say, ‘Uh-oh,’ and pick two books off the syllabus, read them, and write. But that was my job as a student: learn what I wanted to learn and sneak around the rest. As a teacher I had a different job: defend civilization and critical thinking.
I once taught a seminar at Cal where during office hours, three students in a row came in, stayed an average of twenty minutes each, and cried nearly the whole time. At the end of the third session I said to the student, half jokingly but with complete honesty, ‘You all think I care about you as people, when all I want are good papers.’ She said, ‘We know you care about us as people.’ And I thought, do I? That’s why there’s nothing like teaching. It’s all questions, no answers.
A thought-provoking article, thank you Wayne.
It's a sad reason to give up your teaching career, but I completely understand it - and bravo for drawing a line and ending those classes early. Interesting that it was only freshmen who expressed any remorse for their behavior.
Having raised two kids in the 80s/90s (both of whom were, and remain, avid readers), I can't even imagine trying to teach a class or raise a teenager in 2024 when you're constantly competing with screens of various types. The internet can be such a valuable tool, but it can be so destructive too - I think students should be *required* to check their devices at the door for every class, and parents should limit screen time more than many seem to these days. . .
Easy for me to say, I know. Just glad I got in under the wire when reading still meant picking up a hard-copy book and focusing on one thing for more than a few minutes.