Lines that stood out to me and reactions to them (oh god, I'm doing a react video, I hate those):<p>> They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training<p>- I mean, this whole essay then gets reflected the exact same upon the JDs the school has hired, right? They're thinking the exact same thing about you, from the legal perspective<p>> Why buy what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it.<p>-Is this person telling the students to pirate? I mean, good!, but you should come out and just say that, I think.<p>> Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level<p>-This is the average for a US adult (same with grade reading level). All you're saying here is that the university is selecting for average people.<p>> I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop<p>- ... then stop assigning papers? What am I missing here? Look, Plato bemoans that people use writing to not memorize everything anymore. I'm sorry that the essay that you loved as a tool for the mind is essentially dead (and I am too), but we must be brave enough to face that fact and move on.<p>> W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic ... There is no possible way our students, unless they were math or computer science majors, would survive that class.<p>-Funny! I took this exact same book for a class ~20 years ago (...oh god...). I was a STEM major then and the book is essentially just boolean algebra. I whizzed through it, mostly hungover, and all the Philosophy majors barely scraped by. Nothing's changed!<p>>Chronic absenteeism.<p>-Okay, yeah, this is a new thing to me, possibly. I skipped out on an entire GE class once and managed to get a high grade all the same. It was a frosh level class I was just taking for the GE credits though and I was in upperdivision so I never went as I already knew the material. Maybe this is something that is happening with them? That's the most caritable I can get though. I think the author has a real point here.<p>> look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you<p>-I had the exact same speech given to me ~20 years ago, and it was true. Granted this was a physics class, no philosophy. But yeah, especially at the freshman level, the kids fail out of school or change majors a lot. That's the beans.<p>> I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out.<p>-Sounds reasonable to me? Also it sounds like this professor likes being <i>the professor</i> more than they like teaching people. At that age, I'd walk out all the time too. Like, these people are adults, yeah, respects must go both ways. But calling people out on it is, to me, kinda a jerk move.<p>> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides<p>-What the everliving shit?! This person is an asshole? Right? What the fuck was the point of doing this digitally if you can't just endlessly copy and things for free? My company thrives on .ppts and those get sent around like so much spam email. Is this professor living in the stone age? what the hell am I missing here?<p>> Last week I had an email from a student who essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material for him prior to yesterday’s midterm<p>-Ok yeah, no, that's totally fair. Fuck that student, they're an asshat.<p>> Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.<p>-Okay, yeah, this is really why I wanted to 'react' at this. The gambling thing, the addictions. Michael Lewis (<i>Moneyball</i>), has a recent set of articles out on the sports gambling in the US. TLDR: This is as bad as the opioid epidemic. If Mike Lewis is saying that it's as bad as pill popping, look, you should sit up and take action fast. It's almost entirely young men, it's nearly all of them, and about half of them will develop to 'problematic gambling' and ~1/5th to full blown 'gambling addiction'.<p>What that means for our dear Professor here is that almost all your 'male students' (because of that metric alone) should be seen as you would look at medium-heavy opioid users, that are popping pills in your class right now in front of you. How would you treat someone that is doing drugs in your class as you teach? Are you going to treat them a little differently, yeah? Like, nearly wanting to throw them out of the classroom right there? Because that is more akin to what is happening than a simple Tiktok addiction.<p>Look, this country has all of a sudden dug a lot of potholes in the road of life for it's youth. Legal weed, gambling, vapes, porn, AI, tinder, etc. It all adds up to a young person trying to navigate it all. Unfortunately, yeah, that's going to affect the classroom too and the person teaching it.<p>> A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.<p>-Yeah, that's nothing new I'd think. I imagine this professor is mostly bemoaning that they love their subject and school and many students just, well, don't. Oh, and they're addicted to their phones.<p>> It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones.<p>-Yes. Yes! YES! You're not going to be competing with all the PhDs out of your psych department that are getting paid 10-50x your salary now to make sure the undergrads are gambling away the student loan chacks and are endlessly looking at makeup ads and porn and the hell that is tinder. Yes! They are addicted. Treat them as addicts.<p>> What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all?<p>-YES! They must learn the lesson now, or they will never get a job, right? This is the kind thing to do to them, not the nice thing, but the kind thing.<p>> That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.<p>-Okay, yeah, university education has become captured by the very same forces that have addicted your students. No, you're not going to deprive them of anything, it seems, they are already there per this essay. Yes, you're all out of a job, and so now it affects you and now you care? I'm not seeing why I should have a lot of sympathy here. You're not doing the job, the department isn't caring about it's non-TT personnel, let alone adjuncts, let alone student. It seems to me that ya'll need to give a shit about something other than yourself and your interests? I know this is a rant, so logical consistency isn't supposed to really be a part of this. But I'd love a follow up essay that goes into what they think could feasably happen to fix all this.<p>> It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.<p>-Well, I'm sorry to say (as a random internet commentor with no skin in the game), bu it sounds like you all need to get together and demand to be given more or just quit.<p>> All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad.<p>-Yeah man, I think that's all of us. Regroup after this semester and try to get the department together over dinners this summer and think up a better way forward. Do not do this alone, get allies together and make it better. The kids are worth it.<p>> Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.<p>-Yeah. Pause then. It sounds like this professor is burnt out and needs a break. The ax needs a sharpening.