When Alden Jones taught her first back-in-person college class during the pandemic, something surprising happened. “Here I am, teaching the same class I’ve taught for 10 years, using the same book and asking the same questions, and my students were dead-silent,” says Jones, who teaches literature and creative writing at Emerson College, a private liberal arts school in Boston. “Then I would ask easier questions — silent. So I was like, Okay, I know it’s not me and I know it’s not the book, so it must be you. Like, what is going on here?”
The possible reasons were complicated, she recalls for Teen Vogue. In part, likely “shell-shock” from COVID; in part, as one student told her, an increased fear of judgment by peers or getting something wrong. Or, Jones adds, perhaps “this mentality of ‘Why should I think it through when I could get the answer on my phone?’”
But another large question looms over this story and much of the thinking Jones has been doing in the last few years regarding teaching: Are college students struggling with reading more than they did previously? And, if so, what should educators be doing to help them?
Read more at Teen Vogue.
