When I returned to teaching at Enema U, armed with my battered backpack, a wrinkled syllabus, and the misplaced optimism of a man who has clearly forgotten all the life lessons pain once taught him, I expected the usual assortment of freshmen quirks: Perhaps an overconfident first-generation entrepreneur major declaring, “I’m starting a sneaker-flipping business, Professor.” Maybe a creative writing student who insists on being called only by a single cryptic initial. Certainly a few political science majors who already know exactly how to fix the world—and will share those plans with you whether you ask or not.
These are the students who spent their formative academic years marinating in the glow of a laptop at the family kitchen table, while the dog tried in vain to eat their digital homework and the Wi-Fi signal valiantly attempted to fight its way through three interior walls, two appliances, and, occasionally, a large pot of lasagna. They were educated during an era when “unmute yourself” constituted high-level pedagogical intervention. And now they have arrived on campus in person, blinking like cave fish dragged suddenly into the punishing brightness of the sun.
The results have been—in a word—astonishing. In more words, baffling, bewildering, confounding, and intermittently hilarious. Let us catalogue a few notable features of this remarkable generation.
First, there is the matter of readiness. Or, to be accurate, the complete and total absence of it. I have watched freshmen stare in genuine shock when they discover that college involves reading. Not scrolling, not swiping, not watching a three-minute TikTok summary performed by a man with blue hair and a ring light, but reading actual text printed on dead trees. One student asked me, with the hushed solemnity reserved for describing natural disasters, “You mean the textbook is, like, required?” Her tone implied that she believed I was personally responsible for this atrocity.
Then there is the confidence issue. In the Before Times, freshmen possessed the self-assurance of Victorian orphans asking whether they were permitted to breathe indoors. But this generation often does not recognize that their participation might be expected at all. They have been tasked so infrequently that many assume their silence is simply another option on a menu of acceptable behaviors. Years of endless accommodations, lowered standards, and “no one fails” policies have created students who believe the universe will grade them on a curve no matter what they do.
The problem, of course, is that they spent the pandemic years in digital isolation, communicating primarily through text messages, Discord channels, and Minecraft signage. When they did speak in online classes, they directed their thoughts into the hygienic void of a muted microphone. Their only audience feedback was a floating thumbs-up emoji from a classmate who was almost certainly asleep. It is difficult to develop confidence under such circumstances. It is difficult to develop any social skills when your most consistent conversational partner is an algorithm curating your TikTok “For You Page.”
Which brings me to the next issue: technological dependence. These students rely on AI the way earlier generations relied on oxygen, running water, and perhaps the occasional functioning attention span. They use AI for brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising, and, in some cases, breathing. They submit AI-generated explanations for questions no human has ever asked. Pose a question about the Louisiana Purchase, and they will proudly turn in a ChatGPT-composed essay explaining how France sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson in order to finance its upcoming war with the Martians. Not one of them wonders why the textbook has failed to mention this historic interplanetary conflict.
In my colonial Latin America class, I routinely receive material about King George, the Stamp Act, and the Sons of Liberty simply because students forget to tell their AI apparitions that we are not, in fact, studying British North America. Tools designed to enhance learning have instead become replacements for it, the educational equivalent of hiring a butler to chew your food.
This dependence has produced an intellectual diet consisting largely of secondhand thoughts. Many students have read nothing in its original form; they know texts only through AI-generated summaries of summaries of summaries. I assigned a short primary document from colonial Mexico, written in 1620. A student asked whether there was a video version. When I explained that the document predated video by roughly three centuries, he paused, frowned, and said, “So… no video?” He sounded as though the seventeenth century had personally let him down.
Of course, this is not entirely their fault. The conditions under which they were educated would have defeated the ancient Spartans. A Zoom meeting is not a classroom; it is hostage-negotiation-adjacent performance art. Teachers became digital lighthouse keepers, signaling desperately through intellectual fog banks of unstable bandwidth, faulty microphones, and teenagers multitasking themselves into oblivion. Meanwhile, parents attempted to supervise schooling while working full-time jobs, managing a household, and wondering when, exactly, their children had begun to resemble raccoons who had accidentally learned English. Everyone tried. Everyone struggled. Everyone coped as best they could.
Perhaps it is my imagination, but the male students, in aggregate, seem less prepared than the female students. A few years ago, schools—rightly—worried about an educational gender gap and worked hard to make education more appealing to girls. Perhaps we overshot the mark. While there are still good male students, a noticeable number seem to have drifted away, their academic focus replaced by an unwavering commitment to video games, energy drinks, and avoiding eye contact.
And so now the bill has come due. The Covert Covid Cohort has arrived on campuses nationwide: uncertain, anxious, unaccustomed to structure, and prone to asking whether assignments can be turned in using emojis. They shuffle into classrooms like time travelers from a civilization that worshiped glitchy Wi-Fi and ring lights as household gods.
Yet some things remain unchanged. Every exam still manages to kill at least one grandparent, resulting in an impassioned plea for mercy and an extension. Every book assigned is still “the worst book ever written.” And any reading longer than a tweet is still regarded as a Herculean labor of mythic proportions, rivaling the labors of Gilgamesh…only with fewer literary rewards.
In the end, I find myself both exasperated and amused, annoyed and empathetic. This generation may be unprepared, but they are also resilient, strange, creative, and thoroughly modern. They survived an academic environment held together with duct tape, glitchy Zoom links, and the collective willpower of exhausted adults. Now they are here, in our classrooms, blinking in the light. And no matter how much we tease them —and we will—it is now our job to teach them what schooling actually looks like.
Even if they still want every primary source to come in video form.
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