I keep seeing headlines about this, but I had no idea. Sorry for the effect on you, Wayne. Where will this end? Half of what I see on Bluesky is (informed) concern over AI. —diane
Yes. Thank you, Diane. My university is going all in on AI; they've got an instructional program for faculty to use. I'm going to do the mini-course to understand how it can be an asset. Color me skeptical.
That sounds ok. Exhausted by decades of learning, then having to abandon, cherished PC software as it went obsolete, I'm avoiding AI as long as I can. I can only cringe at the prospect of the hardware upgrade it will need.
Thanks Gay. My wife was a teacher/administrator in middle schools who retired just before Covid. It was so rough on her. Our generation talks about a "postwar world," meaning after WWII. We need to redefine everything, because this generation knows nothing but war, disease and climate change. No wonder they are anxious. I should have highlighted the degree of anxiety, depression, and panic attacks they experience, and I did my best to identify by sharing my own experience, and giving mental health days. Maybe the phones give them a temporary sense of security, something tangible to hold on to.
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.
I had the same experience, Hugh, three daughters born in the early 1980s and then the early 1990s. They all were avid readers, or at least passionate about their academic interests (one preferred science and music to literature), but they all have amazing careers, not just jobs. My grandson's favorite activity is me reading him books, over and over. We've gotten through Dante and Virgil...I mean, "Moo Bah La La La," and the rest of the Sandra Boynton canon, including the underrated "Hippos Go Berserk!"
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.
I've seen you lecture, Greil. At your World of Bob Dylan keynote in Tulsain 2023, you started with a long exegesis on film noir with a heavy side of "In a Lonely Place" (1950) with Bogart and Gloria Grahame. The Dylanistas in the audience were getting restless."When is Greil Marcus going to talk about Bob Dylan?!" About 20 minutes in, you paused and said: "Bob Dylan..." and they felt released. Me, I borrowed that first part for my Literature and Film class as an intro to film noir. I never had a lecture class, and my students were often the first in their families to go to college: many families emigrating from war zones in Africa and the Balkans and Latin America, single parent homes in which the student was the primary caretaker for a younger sibling. No privilege, which made them wonderful. But by the end, their work ethic and pressure (some self-imposed, others by proud family expectations) made them so grade-conscious and phone dependent, so anxious, depressed, and prone to panic attacks, that it was emotional triage in the classroom. I did my best to adjust; other professors stayed "my way or the highway." My classes were a refuge for psychic exhaustion; I tried to make it a safe space for the 20 or so in each class. But by the end of last semester, I was physically and emotionally exhausted.
Funny, I was thinking about Slidell yesterday as places in Louisiana I have been: Went on a swamp ride when I had some time after or during a Walker Percy conference in Covington in the mid-1990s.
It was a Slidell swamp ride that started us on the slippery slope of owning two houses. Stopped to stare at my grandmother’s house and the then owner invited us in to see what the inside looked like. Slidell voodoo I’m sure.
I keep seeing headlines about this, but I had no idea. Sorry for the effect on you, Wayne. Where will this end? Half of what I see on Bluesky is (informed) concern over AI. —diane
Yes. Thank you, Diane. My university is going all in on AI; they've got an instructional program for faculty to use. I'm going to do the mini-course to understand how it can be an asset. Color me skeptical.
That sounds ok. Exhausted by decades of learning, then having to abandon, cherished PC software as it went obsolete, I'm avoiding AI as long as I can. I can only cringe at the prospect of the hardware upgrade it will need.
Read "Anxious Generation" and be scared....be very scared. Then try teaching middle schoolers or high school. I'm so glad I'm not teaching anymore.
Thanks Gay. My wife was a teacher/administrator in middle schools who retired just before Covid. It was so rough on her. Our generation talks about a "postwar world," meaning after WWII. We need to redefine everything, because this generation knows nothing but war, disease and climate change. No wonder they are anxious. I should have highlighted the degree of anxiety, depression, and panic attacks they experience, and I did my best to identify by sharing my own experience, and giving mental health days. Maybe the phones give them a temporary sense of security, something tangible to hold on to.
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.
I had the same experience, Hugh, three daughters born in the early 1980s and then the early 1990s. They all were avid readers, or at least passionate about their academic interests (one preferred science and music to literature), but they all have amazing careers, not just jobs. My grandson's favorite activity is me reading him books, over and over. We've gotten through Dante and Virgil...I mean, "Moo Bah La La La," and the rest of the Sandra Boynton canon, including the underrated "Hippos Go Berserk!"
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.
I've seen you lecture, Greil. At your World of Bob Dylan keynote in Tulsain 2023, you started with a long exegesis on film noir with a heavy side of "In a Lonely Place" (1950) with Bogart and Gloria Grahame. The Dylanistas in the audience were getting restless."When is Greil Marcus going to talk about Bob Dylan?!" About 20 minutes in, you paused and said: "Bob Dylan..." and they felt released. Me, I borrowed that first part for my Literature and Film class as an intro to film noir. I never had a lecture class, and my students were often the first in their families to go to college: many families emigrating from war zones in Africa and the Balkans and Latin America, single parent homes in which the student was the primary caretaker for a younger sibling. No privilege, which made them wonderful. But by the end, their work ethic and pressure (some self-imposed, others by proud family expectations) made them so grade-conscious and phone dependent, so anxious, depressed, and prone to panic attacks, that it was emotional triage in the classroom. I did my best to adjust; other professors stayed "my way or the highway." My classes were a refuge for psychic exhaustion; I tried to make it a safe space for the 20 or so in each class. But by the end of last semester, I was physically and emotionally exhausted.
Oh, Wayne! sad, but so true (and funny, too). Sadder still is that these people will be voters.
Funny, I was thinking about Slidell yesterday as places in Louisiana I have been: Went on a swamp ride when I had some time after or during a Walker Percy conference in Covington in the mid-1990s.
It was a Slidell swamp ride that started us on the slippery slope of owning two houses. Stopped to stare at my grandmother’s house and the then owner invited us in to see what the inside looked like. Slidell voodoo I’m sure.
Indeed.