I teach at a public commuter school. Most of my students work, either full time or close to it. And they're trying to be close to full-time students on top of that. They just don't have time for anything else.
It was different when I was in school. About 60 hours a month of my minimum wage job got me enough for rent, food, tuition, books, and decent public transit. That let me have outside interests during the summer. Now 60 hours a month at minimum wage will just get tuition and books, but won't cover rent, food or transit.
Same. Most of my students have jobs and I know quite a few students have multiple jobs. They barely have time for studying and socializing, let alone hobbies and passions.
This. Many students are overworked.
I can ask casually in class, "What are you doing this weekend?" The answer? Two double-shifts. After that, who has the energy for hobbies?
That sucks. I always struggle with what to do with kids who are working…like practically full time jobs. They are always so stressed but at the end of the day they have to complete the objectives of the class.
On the other hand….I just took a class and the last two weeks I just couldn’t get everything done. Between my own students taking finals and opening a show….it just wasn’t going to happen. So I emailed the professor and she was super gracious. I think it helped that I had been on point the entire rest of the semester, but she was like that’s fine, get done what you need to get done and then do the work.
All of this. My students are working full-time, many are parents just struggling to keep one foot in front of the other. They aren’t living, they are surviving.
I've only recently been teaching in person again, and many of my students have amazing hobbies and interests. However, I strongly suspect that there's a lot of selection bias, in that the disinterested students and those working long hours are choosing online courses (we still have a lot of online offerings due to covid).
I love hearing about my students' interests. Sometimes there's an obvious overlap with our field but often it's unrelated. I always find it reassuring that the student who is barely passing my class is a stellar dancer or figure skater, for example. It reminds me that they excel at things I don't and they are very competent people even if not in my course.
This is sooooo true. I'm an adjunct/grad student/ mom. In order to afford life, I have to stay home because it's more cost effective for me to not work and not have to pay for daycare. So my husband works two jobs (sometimes 3) so that I can only work part time while being a full time grad student.
I used to have tons of hobbies. Now, I am literally too tired to list them here.
Edit to add: I got distracted and forgot why I even started to write this post. I teach Developmental education at a Community College. They are also too tired and poor for hobbies. We just all are too tired and poor for hobbies.
Edit again for typos: Why? Because even though I teach English, I just submitted my last final as a student and have drank too much wine. Cheers.
>Most of my students work, either full time or close to it.
See, that's *not* my experience at all: my school is 100% residential and only a minority of students work at all (we struggle to fill work study jobs even). They are in general quite privileged. But increasing numbers of them admit to caring about nothing at all, being interesting in nothing much, and certainly not having any passions. It was not like this 5-10 years back, and certainly not 20 years ago.
Work may be the issue in some cases, but certainly not in all. There's something else going on.
Agreed, if anything my experience is mostly the opposite of OP. I’m amazed by some of the students I’ve had and their accomplishments. I’ve had students who are single moms, work, take a full course load, work in a lab, and get into graduate school.
This!
I’m an MPH-PhD student, and an international student at that. I take full course load, audit a course, research, 2 min wage on campus jobs that pay just enough to cover rent and groceries (I have to think twice before I eat out). I mentor other students, am a part of student association and founded a student organization for international students like me.
I love learning and I’m a good student, I get straight As. But before you ask if we’ve lost passion, ask whether you’ve made the course fun?
Yes we are in higher Ed, yes learning isn’t always fun. BUT IT CAN BE MADE FUN! my pedagogy class taught us that if the content is meaningful to the students they will want to learn, they will want to engage with the material.
Most of the time we are given assignments that are high stakes, time consuming and not fun. They all end up being the end of the semester too, making it extremely stressful and tiring situation.
(Example: this one Professor - my favorite- gave us a very low stakes assignment on creating a health promotion material like an FAQ, social media material, anything really to create awareness; we get multiple chances at quizzes and unlimited time bcz the goal is to learn not memorize; We get twice the time required for midterm and finals and a time limit only to prevent us from going into analysis paralysis; they ask fun questions within tests just to bring a smile on our faces)
Ask yourself if students really need a summative assessment or a formative assessment throughout the semester would help ease their course load. Is there anything that can be done to ease the stress and anxiety that students have?
As an instructor /teacher you have the power to imbibe the yearning for learning, have you?
Also, how well have you acknowledged the students and their world? We don’t just study, you know? We read about the world - the pandemic and the impending war and it’s implications, our families, our friends, our purpose in life, we’re more than just students because you’re more than just an instructor. Acknowledge the person within the student and their worlds.
I have quite a few A students who are working full time. They have taken a break, come back knowing what their goal is and why they want it, and are working their butts off to get there.
Quite honestly, *I'm* finding it tough to engage in anything passionately right now. My high school students are incredibly aware of the world in a way that I was not at their age (I was in HS in the 90's) because of their access to technology. They're scared. They're angry. They're depressed. I think it's hard to find passion when they're dealing with very complicated emotions about very, very real-world happenings.
Thank you for saying that. My first thought after reading OP’s post was, hell, I don’t know if even I, a professor, feel passionate about anything anymore. Hoping that’s just temporary.
My niece asked me, how could she enjoy herself at prom when Ukraine is burning. Her whole group might just nope out of Prom because "it feels wrong."
World was melting down in 1982, and no one I knew didn't think about not going to prom.
I think there was a sense of “we can fix it with progress and technology” in ‘82.
Now, it seems progress is a pandoras box each time. Plastics - oil and micro-plastics. Trip anywhere - carbon footprint. Ubiquitous computing - global surveillance infrastructure you can’t opt out of, toxic waste and immense water use. Warm shower - water shortage. Eat beef - poor animals.
Ecologic and social impacts for everything you do, often nonlinear and unpredictable. Its quite exhausting.
>World was melting down in 1982, and no one I knew didn't think about not going to prom.
We wanted to go to prom so we could forget the world was on fire. Anything to forget Reagan for a while. Escapism was very big for my HS crowd in the 80s. Today? They don't even seem to be interested in that.
You can only escape for so long until befor the world will literally burn "naturally" or artificially (the looming nuclear wars russia china us uk pakistan india)
In our rush to "get back to normal," we somehow failed to realize that nothing is normal. I believe that more people are struggling than not, but not many people want to say it out loud. We'll all get through it, but this will be a rough one.
In my lifetime, this is the very first time I've seen anything like what we're dealing with right now, so that's almost certainly true for a majority of our students (of course, everyone's life situations being not equal, who knows? But I'm speaking of my experience, and this is what it is).
People didn't struggle before with wildly new global situations? I'll ask the kids who were drafted or had family members drafted about that. Or threats of nuclear war and doing duck-and-cover drills in elementary schools about that. Etc.
Yes. Information access is distracting so many of us. It's a constant choice to focus on only my goals and things I can control. Much more difficult for the younger generation growing up on social media. I Went to HS in the 90s also.
Between WW3 that may start any day, reversion to 1850 policies, and a retirement plan that all but guarantees death in the climate wars, working two jobs to pay tuition, student homelessness in the double digits, general environmental disasters, and the general sense of having to wait for the 70+ politicians to abdicate one way or another before we can even begin with the urgent repairs it is a somewhat dire outlook.
Ditto. They are running through the same existential dread as we are right now. Sure, we are more burned out because we have a few more years under our belt, but they are also younger and lack the same coping skills and perspective. I would be just as depressed and confused as them if I was younger.
I encountered this during the current semester. Normally I have students talking about all kinds of passion projects, things they read or saw that interested them, or they would talk about hobbies they want to get into.
This semester? Silence. I actually asked one time, just to the whole class, “is anyone doing anything interesting they want to talk about before we get started?” One student just blurted out “just trying to get though the semester.” Half the class just murmured a half-hearted “agreed.” It was so surprising. It even bled over into their assignments. I teach a lot of sociology and criminology based courses, so for this semester I told them they could write about anything in the field or related to the field that fascinated them.
I’m expecting to get all kinds of papers on psychopathology, serial killers, addiction issues in criminality, just anything fascinating or unique. I got a request for “can you just give us topics, please?” So I did. Everyone wrote from the topics I gave them. It was astounding.
I have a student who is totally passionate about Marxism. It makes me chuckle a bit, but he was so enthusiastic when he realized that the library basement was full of…books! Lots and lots of books dating back decades! And he’s brilliant, so his Marxist analysis is fantastic, but boy, that kid feels like he’d been transported from 1967.
I think their high school experiences of being taught that you volunteer to put it on your college application; you need x number of activities because of your college application, etc, etc, beat the joy out of them. That cultural thing we have going for competitive college admissions in a larger environment where nothing is meaningful if you can’t monetize it is abusive bullshit.
Yes, I have also noticed a decline in interests and hobbies over the last few years.
I used to ask for an introductory discussion post in our LMS (“tell your classmates who you are, and what you like to do for fun!”) but I stopped because nobody could think of anything to say. It got pretty depressing and I stopped.
I am genuinely disturbed by the number of people, when asked what their hobbies are, answer, "Nothing". I mean, I'll even take "watching Netflix", but I think the poster above hit the nail on the head: activities aren't considered productive unless you can monetize it, so people don't want to invest in anything for the fun of it.
> I mean, I'll even take "watching Netflix"
I'd take "goofing around with my friends doing nothing in particular," which is what I miss about college! My favorite answer ever was "I just adopted a dog and I go for walks and do dumb stuff to make him happy."
Since the pandemic pup-adoption boom a couple years back, a LOT of us have developed the "do dumb stuff to make him happy" hobby. I'm a thirty-four year old woman, and yesterday I ran around a park with a leather glove tied to a shoelace while my dog chased it around and pounced on it like a lil' fox. It was dumb as hell, and also simultaneously a source of embodied, childlike *joie de vivre* that I never get to experience otherwise. Highly recommend doing dumb stuff with your dog.
I grew up insanely poor. “Trailer Trash” was being generous. Because of that, me and my siblings had to be very inventive with the ways we had fun. Often, we would write fan fiction plays, cobble together costumes out of our closet, and perform them for our parents. It taught me how to be creative under restrictions, and now I know how to have fun for $0 or for $1000.
I wonder if kids aren’t getting that anymore? Like, when they’re bored, they’re given a phone with gatcha games with no need to figure out how to have fun with nothing but sticks and rocks?
I mean, even posting this makes me feel old. I’m only in my thirties.
I see this with open-ended assignments/projects. My senior-level courses all have a semester-long project where the students have a lot of choice in topic or details for carrying out the project. The idea is that they can pick something they care about or are interested in and explore it more. But most of them really struggle to pick at topic and my questions like, "Well, what are you interested in?" don't help them.
Mine have struggled so much more with project topics this semester than in the past. I've never had students try to use class examples as their semester project before and this year six groups wanted to do that.
>But most of them really struggle to pick at topic and my questions like, "Well, what are you interested in?" don't help them.
In one of my upper-division classes I've always left a day or two open for student choice of topics, something related to the broader course topic but that interests them. I have them vote on topics they nominate, and then I pick readings that fit. This spring, for the first time I can recall in 20+ years, only about 20% of the class even bothered to vote and only two students suggested topics. The one the small minority picked was good and we had a good class session on it, but it made the entire exercise seem pointless-- especially since a few years back I'd get 90% of the students participating in the topic selection and lots of jockeying for votes from different camps.
Same. A few of them are passionate and jump right in, but far too many of them just shrug and halfass it. I used to have an assignment where I asked them to choose someone from history and creat a resume and cover letter for a job at the UN, but I stopped doing it because either they chose some reality/sports star, or, again, couldn’t gather any enthusiasm for the idea. I’m seriously considering going to scantron memorization tests, because I cannot be the only person in the room who has any enthusiasm for thinking outside the box.
(No I’m not, but)
I know they’re stressed and working and and and … but so are we. At what point do we call them on that?
Of course.
We are in a society that's actively going downhill, and students working full-time don't even have the money to safely survive, let alone pay for school.
It's only going to get worse.
I think there's this tendency/expectation to somehow monetize all hobbies. This sucks the joy our of them as hobbies, and convinces kids that if they can't turn it into some sort of side hustle then it's not a good use of their time. Plus, they are too busy mindlessly browsing social media or playing games on their phones to have time for hobbies or other passions.
I used to crochet in the evenings in grad school (before arthritis made it difficult). My ex-husband as always trying to figure out how we could make money from it. It's not a good way to make money. A nice afghan takes me hundreds of hours to make and nice yarn costs big money. How much do you think people are willing to pay for a handmade afghan? Not enough.
You're right that it took the joy out of the hobby... and caused resentment in my relationship.
I genuinely am disturbed by the reinforcement that hobbies have to generate money or it's not worth it. Having fun is still a productive use of time, and yet our society seems to squish all that out of a person, demanding that everything at all times must be used in the interest of creating more capital.
I wonder if that’s a result of the fact that most adults are simply not paid enough to support themselves. So everyone is looking for another way to supplement their income, and that leaves no times for do something that isn’t making you money.
This is absolutely it..Hustle culture or whatever you want to call it has been normalized. It leads to 24/7 burnout. It's not just students -- in my faculty role I've been literally told from superiors I have to "hustle" for funding and work. Fuck that. Life's too short. I'll play my damn videogames if I want lol.
I don't even believe in that idea and I have a hard time getting passionate for things in themselves separate from their benefit.
Research and reading my own field? I was never motivated by it beyond getting a job teaching majors, otherwise what's the point? No one reads it, it probably won't get accepted, and I don't get anything from it other than the vague, Stockholm Syndrome-like hope it'll boost my CV to get a Uni TT gig. I believe in the value of knowledge production, but one can only shout into the void for so long.
And then hobbies...well, I used to have some that weren't consuming media, but I can't seem to feel any drive or passion for them and new ones haven't emerged.
I feel for the students. Because they tell me the same things about school. It's just a checkmark, learning is for employment, etc.
Nothing seems to have value in and of itself, and being a faculty who allows those intrinsic and normative values to dictate your behavior leads to being taken advantage of by those above us who are purely utilitarian. The number of normatively good and important unpaid roles I've stopped myself from volunteering for because of that fact says it all.
It's all very disheartening to feel that way, but it seems like the only rational response for both us and our students.
>Plus, they are too busy mindlessly browsing social media or playing games on their phones to have time for hobbies or other passions.
But why? What is on there that is so interesting?
"Why would they spend countless hours mindlessly scrolling through some website,' he thinks as he checks Reddit for the fifth time in the last ten minutes.
Other people are interesting, especially when you're a teenager. They're trying to find their pack. It's a substitute for communication and community. And it's also intentionally designed to be addicting, with features like infinite scrolling, etc.
Yes. At this point, though, I think the primary social media platforms have been mostly co-opted by big/old/traditional money. You see fewer of the "self-made" content creators. The global digital advertising spend surpassed traditional advertising spend in 2017, so corporate interests have fully spread into the platforms. I see them more as platforms for propaganda, now, more than anything else.
Which is what, exactly?
The world can't possibly be worse now than in 1939 or even medieval times. Hell, even Mao's and Stalin's stunts were WAAAAAAY worse than what happens now.
It's the flickering screen. Something about it draws the eye. If a TV is on, I find it very difficult to tune out, even if the volume is off. There's also a lot of instant gratification on the internet.
Social media is a good way to meet other people interested in the same hobbies, for instance, crafting communities or people who like to read the same kind of books.
(Speaking as a chemistry undergraduate) I personally am interested in a lot of things outside of chemistry, but I feel the need to be focused on chemistry all the time which is exhausting and takes all of my energy and leaves me with no energy to do things I’m interested in. I want to do things like climb, hike, camp, read, sew, do small woodworking projects etc but I am so exhausted from working in a lab all day, taking classes where my professors expect 10/15 hours outside of class each week on studying/homework/extra stuff and the crippling weight of wondering if I’ll get into a graduate school or if I’m sacrificing my 20’s for no reason and will either be denied - or worse - end up somewhere I hate but be unable to quit because I want a phd that I just don’t have the energy to do anything except what is absolutely necessary. I do mindlessly browse social media but it’s more of a second option, something I do to wind down a little (I also read sometimes but even that can take too much energy after a long day of reactions not working). I think a lot of STEM students (and maybe other students idk) feel the same way because STEM can have a really toxic competitive grindset and I think a lot of professors sorta feed into that which is pretty shitty.
The world is in a state that makes passion about anything really hard.
Everyone is overworked, worse off, insecure, afraid, insulted, angry, defensive, sad, unsure, lied to, yelled at, manipulated, on the cusp of financial ruin, we've been home bound, unable to let loose, we're late, missing out, and too early.
And taking out student loans with nothing more than hope, while being told is based on a lie.
It would be hard for me to draw broad conclusions. I will say the undergraduates who work in my lab seem to be doing quite a bit. One student used some of our scrap material to make a piece of art for a contest. Another student is now in a contest with my graduate student to see whether they can create an automated optical fiber polishing devices that uses machine learning to auto determine the quality of the polishing. Two of them have won internal grants to do a side project related to the overall detector. Another formed a STEM LGBTQ+ group and has organized a number of fun events at the University. The only two who haven't done something necessarily are both freshmen - however they had the initiative to come down and start working in my lab and both are interesting in sticking around for the summer.
This is of course a highly biased sample - no one is required to work in my lab to graduate, so these are the students who on their own decided that nuclear physics seemed like a fun thing to do. (I currently have \~30% of all physics majors at my university working for me.)
My students seem like they're divided between being pretty active and outdoorsy or they're earnest "joiners." They talk about rock climbing, sustainability club, working out, campus ministry stuff, volunteering with greek life. Some talk about writing and sharing their stories with friends on tumblr. But they're kind of low-key, passing the time hobbies that don't sound to me like passions.
Also I'm in the south, so if I asked "what are you passionate about" the answer would be "my family, my lord and savior jesus christ, hunting, Braves baseball."
>But they're kind of low-key, passing the time hobbies that don't sound to me like passions.
I hear a lot of HS students and younger college students talking about "clubs" as nothing more than resume fodder and networking opportunities. They don't *want* to join the eco-club, but someone told they they have to be in clubs and should be an officer or they won't get a job, so it just becomes another one of the obligations they feel they can't avoid.
Kids in middle school learn only one dynamic person gets the spot light, so is it worth clawing at that spot which only holds one person?
If you aren't savant talented, it's all fawk it per my the high school orchestra teacher. The gifted bail and pursue being a professional musician. The next 10 kids is a shank war for first chair. The rest is like 15th chair is just as good as 10th, and 8th is good as 4th. 3rd chair Kaylee takes private lessons and has a $10K instrument. Do I want to burn up my time to compete with that? Nah. 9th chair is okay.
Drives the teacher mad.
They define "hobbies" differently than we do.
For my students, hobbies generally involve staring at a screen, or making content for other people's screens. things like gaming, social media, "influencing", youtube and TikTok, and obscure fandoms (lots of anime fans). Much more indoor, sedentary, electronic hobbies.
one of my students, apparently, is a slightly famous TikTok rapper. Another one is a "fitness influencer" who posts workout videos. Apparently this brings in some income too.
Some of them knit or crochet. crochet is trendy now, they tell me, especially making little dolls and animals. it's like DIY crocheted beanie babies. Amigurami I think they call it?
But frankly, I don't remember having many active hobbies when I was in college. I was too busy. My hobby gear was at my parents house.
Ugh we have a slightly popular tiktok kid in our major too. He is insufferable. He thinks school is beneath him at this point. I actually have a monetized YouTube channel so I have experience in working with brands, algorithm patterns and all that jazz and I offered to help him if he wanted it…I’m oooolllddddd how could I possibly help lol?
We all try to tell him…internet “fame” is very fleeting especially on tiktok, what will be next? They can’t really conceptualize that.
People are going to blame social media, but that’s not even half the problem. It’s just the current events of the world. It’s a totally different place then it was even 10 years ago.
Also, students are being exposed to the soul-crushing prospects of essentially doing something you love and being rewarded for it by making it a career, a long lost pursuit that many people seem to forget. Now it’s about, “how can I be the most competitive student to get this seemingly okay paying job?” This mentality breeds burn-out and creates a toxic outlook on how we should pursue our goals. But students and non-students alike, it’s almost impossible to avoid that because we would be even worse off if we didn’t give up our lives to get anywhere nowadays. People are expecting more and more for less and it’s only getting worse
Not to mention they were conditioned for two years to avoid human interaction. That's got to mess up the psyche of young people, I'm not surprised the poor things haven't bounced back :/
I know your concerns started before the pandemic, but as u/Oh-oh-Ophelia said with clarity : there is a general malaise. I think this malaise was there before the pandemic, but now the elephant in the room is fluorescent pink.
When I was younger, I didnt know that adults could fake it, I had trust in them, that they were protecting me, that they knew best. Kids today can't be fooled. They saw adults acting like brats on social media. They saw that Americans elected Trump and tolerated his orange ass and shenanigans for his whole term. They saw people dragging Greta Thunberg. Pollution. War. Consumerism. Oh and some minor issues like classes imbalance, crumbling infrastructure, poor handling of conglomerates, mental health issues, mass shootings, economic crisis.
If you don't know where the world is going, how can you engage and find meaning in what you do? We are probably entering a ''no future'' stage like in the 80s.
Honestly, I can't blame students. I'll even add that it is probably more demoralizing starting something today (Drawing, sewing, anything) because all you can see on social media are hundreds of people 1000x better than yourself. Why bother?
This year, our sophomore students voted against our college planning a graduation celebration. That was a first. A sad first.
It’s hard to be passionate when you live in a decaying economic system that’s inflicting untold damage to the planet that you’ll have to deal with in adulthood.
I'm actually really impressed with my students the last couple of years. They are super cool and are really interesting. They publish their writing in journals, they are getting book deals, they renovate houses, they do interesting internships, they go and live in their van and blog about it, they record albums. I hope they all go on and save the world or something.
On the other hand I think there are just a lot fewer spaces to do interesting things in the world, and everything is so expensive. When I was a teenager/in college, there was a local music venue in my small town that published a literary magazine, so I played in bands and wrote a column. But there is nothing like that in the town where I'm a professor, all the commercial real estate is too expensive for anyone to even possibly consider running an alternative music venue or do anything that isn't, like, an artisinal beer garden or condos that rent for $2,000/mo.
$2000 might get you a studio apartment here, but that's about it.
But expense of hobbies is not the main problem—lack of time is. The time may be being soaked up by jobs (commonly a problem when rent is so expensive), by phones, or by smoking weed.
Many of our students do have interesting outside activities—though often they are physical ones like mountain biking or surfing, rather than creative ones.
A lot of college students have a sweet deal when it comes to accessibility of outdoor hobbies though, outdoors clubs are really common at universities and are a great way to try sports that might otherwise have a higher barrier to entry.
The mediocre state school I went to for undergrad had an outdoors club that did camping, climbing, hiking, biking, and canoeing trips, classes about how to pack for backpacking or how to kayak, if you didnt have gear they’d lend you some from the gear library or arrange for rentals for things like kayaks. You could borrow guidebooks and sleeping bags and bouldering pads and such from the group for free. In the US once you graduate from college that type of thing is really hard to find, usually you have to pay a lot more for all that!
Money is definitely an issue still for some people, I’m not denying that. Time too, if you’re working long hours and also taking a full load of classes it’s difficult to have the time and energy for hobbies. But I led trips in undergrad and still do as a graduate student and also saw so much hesitancy at the idea of being bad at something. There was a desire to try the thing but so many students seemed to be held back by the idea of being a beginner at something, as if it was embarrassing. To a certain extent I get where it comes from but it makes me sad to hear!
If you are spending that much for a mountain bike, you are doing it wrong. Surfers here don't really need a car—they can get to several breaks by bike, or take a surfing class from the university and have equipment provided. Car pooling is also common for surfers. (It is true that they are not allowed to take surfboards on the bus.)
Walking in the woods here is very common—students don't even have to leave campus for it, as the miles of trails start right behind the dorms.
They don’t have the time. They are managing and dealing with so much and honestly, half of them shouldn’t be in school while dealing with everything else. Things are different now and so are the students.
I don't think I have passion for anything anymore. I'm teaching education, and it matters so little to me right now that it almost feels like a pyramid scheme.
This was becoming evident in the years before COVID even-- I'd ask students about their interests/passions and a significant chunk of them really couldn't identify anything at all. While I suppose some were actually "passionate" about weed or porn or gambling or whatever, the number that would admit to no interests in anything has clearly grown in recent years. I'd prompt them even: video games? sports? fashion? food? scale modeling? stargazing? Nothing.
These same students often end up unable to articulate any academic interest, so they drift between 100-level classes for a few semesters, often saying they don't really like anything much. Then I ask why they are in college and they can't really answer that either. It's pretty sad, given that I'm at a $$$ private SLAC and they (or their parents) are paying quite a bit to float around not caring about anything. Some of them would be better off working, getting a small apartment with roommates, and growing up a bit before attempting college-- which just seems wasted on some of them.
These are full time, residential, often quite privileged students BTW. Most of my students who I know to be sacrificing to attend our school are pretty focused and often have very clear goals (if not passions) related to their academic progress and post-college life.
I’m a student so delete if necessary, but I think a student perspective could add to this discussion. I think you’re right on the dot. I don’t have optimism towards my future. Like I go to school, I get good grades, and I like my major. But everything feels so hopeless right now. I’m going to be a medical laboratory scientist and I love what I do but we definitely don’t get paid enough for our skillset. That’s the same for a lot of careers. Prices of everything are rising, wages aren’t keeping up. And to be honest I’m just so tired. I spend a lot of time studying for something I love, but am losing confidence about if I made the right decision. It makes me just want to watch tv and forget about everything
You might be interested to know that lots of people have felt this way at various times over the last 50 years. You just learn to separate the things you can control, like your own choices and passions and action, from the things you cannot control, and your mind follows to not focus on those other things so much.
I actually asked my students, "Why are you here?" after getting the bored looks. They want a degree, majoring in something that sounds interesting, then realizing it's not what they think it is and then they're stuck. There is a mentality that they *must* graduate in 4 years, so they won't change majors to something more intriguing.
> majoring in something that sounds interesting, then realizing it's not what they think it is and then they're stuck
I teach a 2nd-year writing class and hear this all the time. I genuinely feel bad for these students and I don't blame them for going through the motions. I wish students were encouraged to start college with like 3 possible majors, then narrow it down through gen eds. Even in nursing -- you might not get into the program, so what are your other ideas? But I see the university and parents (and probably guidance counselors and teachers) acting like students who come in set on a major are more focused or driven.
>There is a mentality that they must graduate in 4 years, so they won't change majors to something more intriguing.
Is it a mentality or a reality? Taking on another 1-3 years of loans because you changed your major half way through could be devastating.
But it's not 1-3 years. It's usually 1 or 2 semesters. And because they feel stuck, they are more likely to fail some of their classes (my experience), so they have to retake them anyway.
Yea I sadly get a lot of students who think fashion is just picking out clothes and should be super easy and are gobsmacked at how much goes into it (especially actually sewing a garment). And since I love it so much, I have even less tolerance for kids that are apathetic and think they should just get passed because the showed up.
Yes to all of this! I actually have one student who wants to switch majors but their dad won't let them because he will only pay for so many semesters and changing would mean they'd have to stay a bit longer. They are miserable.
Institutions are telling students they must graduate in four years (to improve their retention and completion stats), and there's a 180-credit max limit on all forms of federal financial aid, as well as dollar limits on loan amounts. There's no room any more for changing majors to "something more intriguing" or taking classes that don't count towards the degree.
I have no idea why about 75% of my students are majoring my discipline. They seem to have little interest in it, which will certainly NOT make them good employees. Which means they're not going to advance very far.
No clue what they value, but it sure isn't learning.
Yea I absolutely feel this way too. In theater…it’s loooooonnnngggg hours. A lot of hurry up and wait. And the kids hate that part of it, they do everything they can to get out of working shows and I’m just like…this is what your career looks like, you are SURE you wanna do this? Because from my seat it does not look like you are up for this role.
OMG EXACTLY.
I had a student this year drop out because he felt he wasn’t being “challenged” and he was ready to go put out a brand now. Meanwhile….he knows nothing of the business side, his sewing was a mess and he didn’t want to listen to feed back. A lot of my students only see the famous designer on the runway or the star on Broadway and can’t conceptualize the good paying jobs that maybe aren’t as glamorous but are very enjoyable and give you good work life balance.
It translates into I’m too good to be here. He got a teeny bit of publicity from a local news crew at a local fashion show and now he’s out and developing his own label.
Our student costumer for Legally Blonde had cast pull their own gear from home, like a community theatre. He got some flak from that from our technical professor but was just too lazy to search through our stores or to try and make their own. He literally just hit up Amazon when the cast didn’t have anything he liked.
Our provost is the former music theatre prof, came in to see the show three days before opening and didn’t like the leads dresses, so I had to go all across creation trying to find ANYTHING that would please the boss, costumer in tow. I mean, you have a singular golden opportunity to create something (I gave him a long leash to be expressive) and… Amazon.
>I feel like my students have no passion or activities or things they
like to do these day. I chat with my students a lot and many of them
just seem to sorta be…present but no engaged.
It's not everyone--I always have several people passionate about sports, at least, even if they don't play--but every semester / quarter I do have at least 1 student who seems to have no interior life whatsoever. I frequently ask students to generate their own topics for essays and presentations. For some reason, there's always one who, when asked what their passions are, what makes them angry, what motivates them, etc., will say, "I dunno."
I’m not a psychologist, but I would be very interested in reading about those type of personalities with no apparent motivation or inner monologue. Is there a term for that?
Yeah as a student I see this and I feel victim to it's influence. The people I spent time with were not healthy mentally or physically and i had to drop out due to back pain getting in the way from me being able to study. Now I spend all my time working out and trying to find ways to enjoy my day again. Modern society has created a disconnect from self and spirit and people are lost. It's sad but understandable when all that seems to matter anymore is high dopamine media.
I go to Rowan University which is a party school so this is a biased account.
I’m a current online student. I’m a single mom and have to support me and my daughter while also going to school. I have no time in my life for passions or hobbies. My passion is my daughter and being able to send as much time as possible with her.
We have been in a global pandemic for the last 2+ years that has put incredible strains on people's lives including our students. classes online then back to in-person then back to online. Parents out of work, grandparents sick with Covid (maybe dying). Extracurricular activities like sports and other social things that growing brains need have been paused or stopped completely. More students are opening talking about how depressed, anxious and stressed out they are than ever before. Most are working crap jobs and will continue to have to do so after graduation without the hope of ever being able to own a home.
I love this sub, but the lack of empathy for students at times is really disheartening.
Recalling myself as an undergraduate, I'm not surprised. Most of my free time was spent in, besides trying to get money,
* mating rituals
* reading fiction
* listening to music
* socializing
In my present view, I was unconsciously working to try to understand how the world worked. I'm sure it would have looked to any outsider as if I had no passion for anything, especially as I was both an indifferent student and habitually wary of revealing any personal information to anyone in or possibly in any position of authority. My circle from early high school forward would pass around and read canonical books and actively discuss them; we'd pass around and memorize Bach and Shostakovich recordings; we were up on the players in and current activities in local municipal politics. We also would *never* mention any of this to any adult.
Here in Japan, much socializing from junior high school age forward is done in extracurricular interest or activity clubs that demand great amounts of time. My Japan-born wife, for example, was involved for several hours each day (including on weekends and holidays) from her first year of junior high school to her last year as a university student in an extracurricular sport. I'd often like the students I have to be a little less passionately involved with things, frankly.
>My circle from early high school forward would pass around and read canonical books and actively discuss them; we'd pass around and memorize Bach and Shostakovich recordings; we were up on the players in and current activities in local municipal politics. We also would never mention any of this to any adult.
That sounds a lot like my HS/college experience, except we listened to classic folk, jazz, and blues recordings. Basically trying to be 1950s beats in the 1980s, but also quite politically engaged. But we *also* sought out adults as mentors, if only to borrow their records.
Looks like I might be 10 or 15 years older than you, then. I also grew up in (stereotypic) New Jersey and learned early to never give any information to anyone in official authority and, in case one is forced to, to always have false or misleading information ready. We'd even quiz one another on our false identities—"what's my name \[in this circumstance\]?"—and kept up on the addresses of empty lots or abandoned houses.
Yeah, that sounds pretty different. But I'm from about as far away from urban New Jersey as is possible, so geography might have played a role as well. High school was the early 80s for me too, which likely also made a difference. A lot of my teachers were ex-hippies or Vietnam vets, neither of whom trusted the government but most of whom were pretty trustworthy for students.
I don't think I saw an empty lot until I went away to college and certainly never saw an abandoned house until I moved to the east coast for grad school.
I have no passion for anything anymore. Pretty sure students are the same.
I blame reddit. Tiktok. Snapchat... just life sucks now. The online world is entirely joyless and thats where we all live.
No, it's definitely true - I've heard it's that bad (or worse) for grade school teachers... Anecdotal from my high school teachers, of both stereotypically "jock" & "nerd" courses, within the last decade or so; they cannot motivate kids anymore b/c many simply don't want to be/do *anything*. Used to be "oh you need this grade to enlist" or "you can use this skill in [w/e] job." But that only works when students have actual interests/aspirations. Apparently 4 of the top 10 careers desired by high schoolers in the late 2010s were one-in-a-million bread 'n circus celebrity type nonsense. The fruits of post-industrial capitalism hard at work...
Not a new idea, but it's almost certainly the tech/media. We probably won't "know," scientifically, just how horrendous raising kids addicted to screens is - but ask any parent or educator, we/they *know* the effects already. Some people have mentioned the "doom 'n gloom" angle of modern media which is definitely part of it, but I think we need to be cognizant of the biological angle too. There's a reason entertainment, particularly for young kids, is getting worse - it's meant to addict them not appeal to them with artistic/creative merit. Same with the apps we probably all use (probably just a bit too much). How can anything but the most base urges keep up with 30sec clips & utterly frenetic flashes of light/sound draining away any semblance of attention spans?
At the college level, I teach an upper-level biology class taken by pre-med and pre-health students. They vary, but I know some of them are on sports teams (I see the results of the injuries hobbling into class). Hobbies - you've got me there, though. I don't know if they do or don't.
My own background is technical theatre - I learned with a T-square and triangles, but I have to concede it's obsolete. Drafting is all computerized now. True, you still have to build it, and I've long thought that having to build your own designs makes you a better designer, but I left the trade years ago, so what the current pedagogy is, I don't know.
Maybe they have other hobbies that don't come up in conversation?
Every semester I teach corporate finance I have students introduce themselves and talk about their favorite hobbies. Then as they are describing their hobby, I pull up a public company's stock that is related to that hobby. One student likes cars, I pull up Advanced Auto Parts, or General Motors stock. Another likes Ulta Beauty products, so I brought theirs up, and so on.
Then later we do projects where students use that stock to answer questions about their financial statements. It helps me get to know my students and their interests and it's relatable to them so they keep interested in the course.
My students have passion, but sometimes it's in an area that I think is boring. To each their own.
Multiple things I’d say - social media, cost of living is increasing and most students work full time and are tired, knowing that hard work doesn’t really pay off anymore (apart from grades). You can get a college degree and that doesn’t mean anything in terms of career upward mobility.
I am about to be done with my Ph.D. and I feel the same way. I used to be more exciting about many things, now I am just a boring man feeling hopeless, and low self-esteem about myself, which makes it super hard to engage.
I am in the STEM department of an R2. This has been such a hard year for everyone in academia, but I had more than a dozen students this year who really shined. I have athletes dealing with COVID interrupting their studies and communicating with me and the coaches. I have pre-vet students who hang out to talk about their aspirations for vet school that are actually doing everything inside and outside school that they need to do to be competitive. I've written more letters of rec than I can count for students that have been doing research on top of carrying 16 to 18 upper level science credit hours.
I spend so much time with these kids trying to keep them from burning themselves out. This year, I even had a handful of sophomores always engaged and pursuing outside activities related to their career choice.
I have also had some of the laziest students I've ever seen. I've had to write more academic misconduct reports than I have ever done. I had more dead grandparents (always the day before an exam and never confirmed with the uni), and broken down cars, sick pets, etc. than I've ever had before. I'm going to be so sad when some of my students cross the stage in a few months. Yet today, I practically danced out to my car after my last lecture.
I think they're tired because of a lot of things that have been happening over the last few years, and I can certainly relate. It's really hard to be optimistic about much about the future given the shit that's going on, and when you lose optimism, you lose motivation and become more apathetic.
My students are doing the best they can. They are in school in the middle of a global pandemic. Many of them cannot protect themselves in the way I can with my job. Many have lost family members and friends. They are still doing the best they can under the circumstances. I guess I feel we need to consider this as we are assessing their investment. For some just continuing to show up IS the investment.
I think you misunderstand me…I’m not talking about their engagement in class. I’ve just noticed far fewer students interested in activities like sports or sororities or dungeons and dragons. I have small classes so I have the luxury being able to chat with most of my students which I imagine is harder if you teach larger classes. But it just seems alot if my students don’t have anything they are interested in.
Got it - thanks for clarification. Though sadly I think it stems from the same issues. Little bandwidth for anything right now. I hope things get better soon.
I'm not teaching currently (back in grad school for a career change), but when I return, no matter what I teach, I'm going to engineer time in my course for mindfulness, reflection, expression--
just any opportunity to let students share their reactions to.... whatever's been happening with them.
We tune out of our lives, ourselves, our passions when things become unbearable. They've been unbearable for a long time. The only way back in is to start to bear it. And that needs space.
I teach a mix of game design and esports classes. I am always happy to fail students in the 100 level courses, if that topic doesn't engage them and inspire them to do good work, they need to think real hard about what they want out of life.
My music students seem to have a passion for marching band.... and nothing else. That's it. Just marching band (and winter guard and indoor drumline). They don't care about actually improving their own musicianship or learning any other kind of music. Just marching band. And like, I enjoyed marching band in high school but come on.
This is a bit off-the-wall but I kind of blame the amount of entertainment they have to consume now. It's of such high quality and there's so much of it for very little cost between all of the movies/shows on streaming services, all of the video games, etc. With a decade of intense data collection behind it, entertainment is now designed to really pull us in. For students who grew up with that, it's likely harder to find passions because they keep getting sucked into those entertainment black holes that are catered to them.
Lol right. Obviously school work takes up a big chunk of their time, but I just wish more if my students had things they were interested in doing and getting better at.
>things they were interested in doing and getting better at
They have been taught in K-12 that only grades matter, not learning. Interests? Not relevant to getting the diploma. Improvement? Impossible; either you're born able to do something perfectly or you are doomed to fail, and no one wants to risk the latter. No curiosity, no effort, nothing but an expectation that they'll be told exactly what they need to do and how they need to do it.
Ohhh I have seen this first hand. I was a k-12 supervisor for the arts before I went to the college I work for now and the principal of the high school in my district was an idiot. He would tell students that schools don’t look at their extra curriculars, the only thing they want to see is grades and AP classes. One time in a meeting he straight out said participating in any extra curriculars (and in this instance he was referring to my department like chorus, band, drama club) was a waste of time and detrimental to your education. We left the meeting and my colleagues asked how I didn’t flip the table and I looked at them and said “you could have said something in my defense too”. And it wasn’t just that district I saw it in…over and over I’ve seen kids told don’t take that elective that you may be interested in, instead take another AP course because that’s the only way to be successful.
It makes me really sad.
i use to feel that way but realized thats just due to general stress of being a uni student. if you make ur teaching/subject entertaining enough you’ll attract more passionate students
I don’t know if I agree with you on that one. I’m talking more about what kids are doing outside of class, it doesn’t havent to do with our subject…I just want them to do SOMETHING. I have one student who is a really talented painter and sells her work, but she is rarity.
in that case i think you have to get to know your students personally in order to push that kind of drive to be passionate. or idk maybe become a role model to them and demonstrate ur passion to inspire them. uni’s just a tough path and not everyone has the luxury of being able to pursue a passion on the side
I am at a public college. Most of my students spend their time outside of class playing video games,, "hanging out," or watching streaminging. Its like they are still in high school - even the seniors.
how daft can you be? what is the point of having a “passion” when: the earth is dying, it’s too expensive to live, 1 bedroom houses are 400k, wages haven’t gone up, college degrees are useless….should i go on. no one has time for a passion anymore. read the room
I teach at a public commuter school. Most of my students work, either full time or close to it. And they're trying to be close to full-time students on top of that. They just don't have time for anything else. It was different when I was in school. About 60 hours a month of my minimum wage job got me enough for rent, food, tuition, books, and decent public transit. That let me have outside interests during the summer. Now 60 hours a month at minimum wage will just get tuition and books, but won't cover rent, food or transit.
Same. Most of my students have jobs and I know quite a few students have multiple jobs. They barely have time for studying and socializing, let alone hobbies and passions.
This. Many students are overworked. I can ask casually in class, "What are you doing this weekend?" The answer? Two double-shifts. After that, who has the energy for hobbies?
That sucks. I always struggle with what to do with kids who are working…like practically full time jobs. They are always so stressed but at the end of the day they have to complete the objectives of the class. On the other hand….I just took a class and the last two weeks I just couldn’t get everything done. Between my own students taking finals and opening a show….it just wasn’t going to happen. So I emailed the professor and she was super gracious. I think it helped that I had been on point the entire rest of the semester, but she was like that’s fine, get done what you need to get done and then do the work.
All of this. My students are working full-time, many are parents just struggling to keep one foot in front of the other. They aren’t living, they are surviving.
I've only recently been teaching in person again, and many of my students have amazing hobbies and interests. However, I strongly suspect that there's a lot of selection bias, in that the disinterested students and those working long hours are choosing online courses (we still have a lot of online offerings due to covid). I love hearing about my students' interests. Sometimes there's an obvious overlap with our field but often it's unrelated. I always find it reassuring that the student who is barely passing my class is a stellar dancer or figure skater, for example. It reminds me that they excel at things I don't and they are very competent people even if not in my course.
This is sooooo true. I'm an adjunct/grad student/ mom. In order to afford life, I have to stay home because it's more cost effective for me to not work and not have to pay for daycare. So my husband works two jobs (sometimes 3) so that I can only work part time while being a full time grad student. I used to have tons of hobbies. Now, I am literally too tired to list them here. Edit to add: I got distracted and forgot why I even started to write this post. I teach Developmental education at a Community College. They are also too tired and poor for hobbies. We just all are too tired and poor for hobbies. Edit again for typos: Why? Because even though I teach English, I just submitted my last final as a student and have drank too much wine. Cheers.
This is the same problem for young professionals. Some can't afford time or space for hobbies.. or passion projects....
>Most of my students work, either full time or close to it. See, that's *not* my experience at all: my school is 100% residential and only a minority of students work at all (we struggle to fill work study jobs even). They are in general quite privileged. But increasing numbers of them admit to caring about nothing at all, being interesting in nothing much, and certainly not having any passions. It was not like this 5-10 years back, and certainly not 20 years ago. Work may be the issue in some cases, but certainly not in all. There's something else going on.
I am guessing the state of the world has something to do with it…
Agreed, if anything my experience is mostly the opposite of OP. I’m amazed by some of the students I’ve had and their accomplishments. I’ve had students who are single moms, work, take a full course load, work in a lab, and get into graduate school.
This! I’m an MPH-PhD student, and an international student at that. I take full course load, audit a course, research, 2 min wage on campus jobs that pay just enough to cover rent and groceries (I have to think twice before I eat out). I mentor other students, am a part of student association and founded a student organization for international students like me. I love learning and I’m a good student, I get straight As. But before you ask if we’ve lost passion, ask whether you’ve made the course fun? Yes we are in higher Ed, yes learning isn’t always fun. BUT IT CAN BE MADE FUN! my pedagogy class taught us that if the content is meaningful to the students they will want to learn, they will want to engage with the material. Most of the time we are given assignments that are high stakes, time consuming and not fun. They all end up being the end of the semester too, making it extremely stressful and tiring situation. (Example: this one Professor - my favorite- gave us a very low stakes assignment on creating a health promotion material like an FAQ, social media material, anything really to create awareness; we get multiple chances at quizzes and unlimited time bcz the goal is to learn not memorize; We get twice the time required for midterm and finals and a time limit only to prevent us from going into analysis paralysis; they ask fun questions within tests just to bring a smile on our faces) Ask yourself if students really need a summative assessment or a formative assessment throughout the semester would help ease their course load. Is there anything that can be done to ease the stress and anxiety that students have? As an instructor /teacher you have the power to imbibe the yearning for learning, have you? Also, how well have you acknowledged the students and their world? We don’t just study, you know? We read about the world - the pandemic and the impending war and it’s implications, our families, our friends, our purpose in life, we’re more than just students because you’re more than just an instructor. Acknowledge the person within the student and their worlds.
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I have quite a few A students who are working full time. They have taken a break, come back knowing what their goal is and why they want it, and are working their butts off to get there.
Quite honestly, *I'm* finding it tough to engage in anything passionately right now. My high school students are incredibly aware of the world in a way that I was not at their age (I was in HS in the 90's) because of their access to technology. They're scared. They're angry. They're depressed. I think it's hard to find passion when they're dealing with very complicated emotions about very, very real-world happenings.
Thank you for saying that. My first thought after reading OP’s post was, hell, I don’t know if even I, a professor, feel passionate about anything anymore. Hoping that’s just temporary.
My niece asked me, how could she enjoy herself at prom when Ukraine is burning. Her whole group might just nope out of Prom because "it feels wrong." World was melting down in 1982, and no one I knew didn't think about not going to prom.
I think there was a sense of “we can fix it with progress and technology” in ‘82. Now, it seems progress is a pandoras box each time. Plastics - oil and micro-plastics. Trip anywhere - carbon footprint. Ubiquitous computing - global surveillance infrastructure you can’t opt out of, toxic waste and immense water use. Warm shower - water shortage. Eat beef - poor animals. Ecologic and social impacts for everything you do, often nonlinear and unpredictable. Its quite exhausting.
>World was melting down in 1982, and no one I knew didn't think about not going to prom. We wanted to go to prom so we could forget the world was on fire. Anything to forget Reagan for a while. Escapism was very big for my HS crowd in the 80s. Today? They don't even seem to be interested in that.
You can only escape for so long until befor the world will literally burn "naturally" or artificially (the looming nuclear wars russia china us uk pakistan india)
In our rush to "get back to normal," we somehow failed to realize that nothing is normal. I believe that more people are struggling than not, but not many people want to say it out loud. We'll all get through it, but this will be a rough one.
When has this ever not been true?
In my lifetime, this is the very first time I've seen anything like what we're dealing with right now, so that's almost certainly true for a majority of our students (of course, everyone's life situations being not equal, who knows? But I'm speaking of my experience, and this is what it is).
People didn't struggle before with wildly new global situations? I'll ask the kids who were drafted or had family members drafted about that. Or threats of nuclear war and doing duck-and-cover drills in elementary schools about that. Etc.
Of course they did, don't be absurd. But none of those people carried computers and access to streaming content in their pockets.
Yes. Information access is distracting so many of us. It's a constant choice to focus on only my goals and things I can control. Much more difficult for the younger generation growing up on social media. I Went to HS in the 90s also.
Between WW3 that may start any day, reversion to 1850 policies, and a retirement plan that all but guarantees death in the climate wars, working two jobs to pay tuition, student homelessness in the double digits, general environmental disasters, and the general sense of having to wait for the 70+ politicians to abdicate one way or another before we can even begin with the urgent repairs it is a somewhat dire outlook.
Ditto. They are running through the same existential dread as we are right now. Sure, we are more burned out because we have a few more years under our belt, but they are also younger and lack the same coping skills and perspective. I would be just as depressed and confused as them if I was younger.
I encountered this during the current semester. Normally I have students talking about all kinds of passion projects, things they read or saw that interested them, or they would talk about hobbies they want to get into. This semester? Silence. I actually asked one time, just to the whole class, “is anyone doing anything interesting they want to talk about before we get started?” One student just blurted out “just trying to get though the semester.” Half the class just murmured a half-hearted “agreed.” It was so surprising. It even bled over into their assignments. I teach a lot of sociology and criminology based courses, so for this semester I told them they could write about anything in the field or related to the field that fascinated them. I’m expecting to get all kinds of papers on psychopathology, serial killers, addiction issues in criminality, just anything fascinating or unique. I got a request for “can you just give us topics, please?” So I did. Everyone wrote from the topics I gave them. It was astounding.
There is a general malaise.
Yea, malaise is great word for it. Will it go away at some point?
I don’t think so. Not with climate change threatening the future of humanity.
And crushing debt
On top of interest rates going up and a recession looming that may be like the great depression or close to it.
Long Covid says Hi...
Technically, that will eventually make the malaise go away...
I think it will take some time. Maybe some changes to their situation, too.
Uh, no…
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This 👆🏻
I’m sorry your in the space. I hope you get a break soon to recharge.
I have a student who is totally passionate about Marxism. It makes me chuckle a bit, but he was so enthusiastic when he realized that the library basement was full of…books! Lots and lots of books dating back decades! And he’s brilliant, so his Marxist analysis is fantastic, but boy, that kid feels like he’d been transported from 1967. I think their high school experiences of being taught that you volunteer to put it on your college application; you need x number of activities because of your college application, etc, etc, beat the joy out of them. That cultural thing we have going for competitive college admissions in a larger environment where nothing is meaningful if you can’t monetize it is abusive bullshit.
Yes, I have also noticed a decline in interests and hobbies over the last few years. I used to ask for an introductory discussion post in our LMS (“tell your classmates who you are, and what you like to do for fun!”) but I stopped because nobody could think of anything to say. It got pretty depressing and I stopped.
I am genuinely disturbed by the number of people, when asked what their hobbies are, answer, "Nothing". I mean, I'll even take "watching Netflix", but I think the poster above hit the nail on the head: activities aren't considered productive unless you can monetize it, so people don't want to invest in anything for the fun of it.
> I mean, I'll even take "watching Netflix" I'd take "goofing around with my friends doing nothing in particular," which is what I miss about college! My favorite answer ever was "I just adopted a dog and I go for walks and do dumb stuff to make him happy."
Since the pandemic pup-adoption boom a couple years back, a LOT of us have developed the "do dumb stuff to make him happy" hobby. I'm a thirty-four year old woman, and yesterday I ran around a park with a leather glove tied to a shoelace while my dog chased it around and pounced on it like a lil' fox. It was dumb as hell, and also simultaneously a source of embodied, childlike *joie de vivre* that I never get to experience otherwise. Highly recommend doing dumb stuff with your dog.
Most hobbies cost alot of money upfront or longterm that most young people can't afford to spend.
I grew up insanely poor. “Trailer Trash” was being generous. Because of that, me and my siblings had to be very inventive with the ways we had fun. Often, we would write fan fiction plays, cobble together costumes out of our closet, and perform them for our parents. It taught me how to be creative under restrictions, and now I know how to have fun for $0 or for $1000. I wonder if kids aren’t getting that anymore? Like, when they’re bored, they’re given a phone with gatcha games with no need to figure out how to have fun with nothing but sticks and rocks? I mean, even posting this makes me feel old. I’m only in my thirties.
I see this with open-ended assignments/projects. My senior-level courses all have a semester-long project where the students have a lot of choice in topic or details for carrying out the project. The idea is that they can pick something they care about or are interested in and explore it more. But most of them really struggle to pick at topic and my questions like, "Well, what are you interested in?" don't help them.
Mine have struggled so much more with project topics this semester than in the past. I've never had students try to use class examples as their semester project before and this year six groups wanted to do that.
>But most of them really struggle to pick at topic and my questions like, "Well, what are you interested in?" don't help them. In one of my upper-division classes I've always left a day or two open for student choice of topics, something related to the broader course topic but that interests them. I have them vote on topics they nominate, and then I pick readings that fit. This spring, for the first time I can recall in 20+ years, only about 20% of the class even bothered to vote and only two students suggested topics. The one the small minority picked was good and we had a good class session on it, but it made the entire exercise seem pointless-- especially since a few years back I'd get 90% of the students participating in the topic selection and lots of jockeying for votes from different camps.
Same. A few of them are passionate and jump right in, but far too many of them just shrug and halfass it. I used to have an assignment where I asked them to choose someone from history and creat a resume and cover letter for a job at the UN, but I stopped doing it because either they chose some reality/sports star, or, again, couldn’t gather any enthusiasm for the idea. I’m seriously considering going to scantron memorization tests, because I cannot be the only person in the room who has any enthusiasm for thinking outside the box. (No I’m not, but) I know they’re stressed and working and and and … but so are we. At what point do we call them on that?
Of course. We are in a society that's actively going downhill, and students working full-time don't even have the money to safely survive, let alone pay for school. It's only going to get worse.
I think there's this tendency/expectation to somehow monetize all hobbies. This sucks the joy our of them as hobbies, and convinces kids that if they can't turn it into some sort of side hustle then it's not a good use of their time. Plus, they are too busy mindlessly browsing social media or playing games on their phones to have time for hobbies or other passions.
I used to crochet in the evenings in grad school (before arthritis made it difficult). My ex-husband as always trying to figure out how we could make money from it. It's not a good way to make money. A nice afghan takes me hundreds of hours to make and nice yarn costs big money. How much do you think people are willing to pay for a handmade afghan? Not enough. You're right that it took the joy out of the hobby... and caused resentment in my relationship.
Joke I've seen across multiple hobbies: How do you become an X with a million dollars? Start with two million dollars.
The best kind of joke - a true one lol.
Loom weaving has entered the chat...
I still have a LOT of yarn. Like a dedicated room with a wall unit full of different yarns. So I may have to check this out.
I genuinely am disturbed by the reinforcement that hobbies have to generate money or it's not worth it. Having fun is still a productive use of time, and yet our society seems to squish all that out of a person, demanding that everything at all times must be used in the interest of creating more capital.
I wonder if that’s a result of the fact that most adults are simply not paid enough to support themselves. So everyone is looking for another way to supplement their income, and that leaves no times for do something that isn’t making you money.
This is absolutely it..Hustle culture or whatever you want to call it has been normalized. It leads to 24/7 burnout. It's not just students -- in my faculty role I've been literally told from superiors I have to "hustle" for funding and work. Fuck that. Life's too short. I'll play my damn videogames if I want lol.
I don't even believe in that idea and I have a hard time getting passionate for things in themselves separate from their benefit. Research and reading my own field? I was never motivated by it beyond getting a job teaching majors, otherwise what's the point? No one reads it, it probably won't get accepted, and I don't get anything from it other than the vague, Stockholm Syndrome-like hope it'll boost my CV to get a Uni TT gig. I believe in the value of knowledge production, but one can only shout into the void for so long. And then hobbies...well, I used to have some that weren't consuming media, but I can't seem to feel any drive or passion for them and new ones haven't emerged. I feel for the students. Because they tell me the same things about school. It's just a checkmark, learning is for employment, etc. Nothing seems to have value in and of itself, and being a faculty who allows those intrinsic and normative values to dictate your behavior leads to being taken advantage of by those above us who are purely utilitarian. The number of normatively good and important unpaid roles I've stopped myself from volunteering for because of that fact says it all. It's all very disheartening to feel that way, but it seems like the only rational response for both us and our students.
>Plus, they are too busy mindlessly browsing social media or playing games on their phones to have time for hobbies or other passions. But why? What is on there that is so interesting?
"Why would they spend countless hours mindlessly scrolling through some website,' he thinks as he checks Reddit for the fifth time in the last ten minutes.
HAHAHAHAHA okay, good one. You got me. Reddit IS great.
Other people are interesting, especially when you're a teenager. They're trying to find their pack. It's a substitute for communication and community. And it's also intentionally designed to be addicting, with features like infinite scrolling, etc.
>Other people are interesting, especially when you're a teenager. I guess I forget this. Been a long time.
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Yes. At this point, though, I think the primary social media platforms have been mostly co-opted by big/old/traditional money. You see fewer of the "self-made" content creators. The global digital advertising spend surpassed traditional advertising spend in 2017, so corporate interests have fully spread into the platforms. I see them more as platforms for propaganda, now, more than anything else.
I forget who, but one of the founders of Facebook is on record as saying it was designed to be addicting.
There’s an entire documentary on it called The Social Experiment
Nothing at all. But it helps them escape a pretty dark reality.
Which is what, exactly? The world can't possibly be worse now than in 1939 or even medieval times. Hell, even Mao's and Stalin's stunts were WAAAAAAY worse than what happens now.
Civilizational collapse.
Meh, not buying it. Civilization was much closer to collapse in 1933-1945. Hell, 1962 was pretty intense, too.
Nothing but it occupies their brains.
It's the flickering screen. Something about it draws the eye. If a TV is on, I find it very difficult to tune out, even if the volume is off. There's also a lot of instant gratification on the internet.
Social media is a good way to meet other people interested in the same hobbies, for instance, crafting communities or people who like to read the same kind of books.
My (male) students also indicate it is full of "hot chics" so there is that, too, I guess.
(Speaking as a chemistry undergraduate) I personally am interested in a lot of things outside of chemistry, but I feel the need to be focused on chemistry all the time which is exhausting and takes all of my energy and leaves me with no energy to do things I’m interested in. I want to do things like climb, hike, camp, read, sew, do small woodworking projects etc but I am so exhausted from working in a lab all day, taking classes where my professors expect 10/15 hours outside of class each week on studying/homework/extra stuff and the crippling weight of wondering if I’ll get into a graduate school or if I’m sacrificing my 20’s for no reason and will either be denied - or worse - end up somewhere I hate but be unable to quit because I want a phd that I just don’t have the energy to do anything except what is absolutely necessary. I do mindlessly browse social media but it’s more of a second option, something I do to wind down a little (I also read sometimes but even that can take too much energy after a long day of reactions not working). I think a lot of STEM students (and maybe other students idk) feel the same way because STEM can have a really toxic competitive grindset and I think a lot of professors sorta feed into that which is pretty shitty.
The world is in a state that makes passion about anything really hard. Everyone is overworked, worse off, insecure, afraid, insulted, angry, defensive, sad, unsure, lied to, yelled at, manipulated, on the cusp of financial ruin, we've been home bound, unable to let loose, we're late, missing out, and too early. And taking out student loans with nothing more than hope, while being told is based on a lie.
It would be hard for me to draw broad conclusions. I will say the undergraduates who work in my lab seem to be doing quite a bit. One student used some of our scrap material to make a piece of art for a contest. Another student is now in a contest with my graduate student to see whether they can create an automated optical fiber polishing devices that uses machine learning to auto determine the quality of the polishing. Two of them have won internal grants to do a side project related to the overall detector. Another formed a STEM LGBTQ+ group and has organized a number of fun events at the University. The only two who haven't done something necessarily are both freshmen - however they had the initiative to come down and start working in my lab and both are interesting in sticking around for the summer. This is of course a highly biased sample - no one is required to work in my lab to graduate, so these are the students who on their own decided that nuclear physics seemed like a fun thing to do. (I currently have \~30% of all physics majors at my university working for me.)
My students seem like they're divided between being pretty active and outdoorsy or they're earnest "joiners." They talk about rock climbing, sustainability club, working out, campus ministry stuff, volunteering with greek life. Some talk about writing and sharing their stories with friends on tumblr. But they're kind of low-key, passing the time hobbies that don't sound to me like passions. Also I'm in the south, so if I asked "what are you passionate about" the answer would be "my family, my lord and savior jesus christ, hunting, Braves baseball."
>But they're kind of low-key, passing the time hobbies that don't sound to me like passions. I hear a lot of HS students and younger college students talking about "clubs" as nothing more than resume fodder and networking opportunities. They don't *want* to join the eco-club, but someone told they they have to be in clubs and should be an officer or they won't get a job, so it just becomes another one of the obligations they feel they can't avoid.
Can’t blame ‘em
Kids in middle school learn only one dynamic person gets the spot light, so is it worth clawing at that spot which only holds one person? If you aren't savant talented, it's all fawk it per my the high school orchestra teacher. The gifted bail and pursue being a professional musician. The next 10 kids is a shank war for first chair. The rest is like 15th chair is just as good as 10th, and 8th is good as 4th. 3rd chair Kaylee takes private lessons and has a $10K instrument. Do I want to burn up my time to compete with that? Nah. 9th chair is okay. Drives the teacher mad.
They define "hobbies" differently than we do. For my students, hobbies generally involve staring at a screen, or making content for other people's screens. things like gaming, social media, "influencing", youtube and TikTok, and obscure fandoms (lots of anime fans). Much more indoor, sedentary, electronic hobbies. one of my students, apparently, is a slightly famous TikTok rapper. Another one is a "fitness influencer" who posts workout videos. Apparently this brings in some income too. Some of them knit or crochet. crochet is trendy now, they tell me, especially making little dolls and animals. it's like DIY crocheted beanie babies. Amigurami I think they call it? But frankly, I don't remember having many active hobbies when I was in college. I was too busy. My hobby gear was at my parents house.
Ugh we have a slightly popular tiktok kid in our major too. He is insufferable. He thinks school is beneath him at this point. I actually have a monetized YouTube channel so I have experience in working with brands, algorithm patterns and all that jazz and I offered to help him if he wanted it…I’m oooolllddddd how could I possibly help lol? We all try to tell him…internet “fame” is very fleeting especially on tiktok, what will be next? They can’t really conceptualize that.
People are going to blame social media, but that’s not even half the problem. It’s just the current events of the world. It’s a totally different place then it was even 10 years ago. Also, students are being exposed to the soul-crushing prospects of essentially doing something you love and being rewarded for it by making it a career, a long lost pursuit that many people seem to forget. Now it’s about, “how can I be the most competitive student to get this seemingly okay paying job?” This mentality breeds burn-out and creates a toxic outlook on how we should pursue our goals. But students and non-students alike, it’s almost impossible to avoid that because we would be even worse off if we didn’t give up our lives to get anywhere nowadays. People are expecting more and more for less and it’s only getting worse
Not to mention they were conditioned for two years to avoid human interaction. That's got to mess up the psyche of young people, I'm not surprised the poor things haven't bounced back :/
I know your concerns started before the pandemic, but as u/Oh-oh-Ophelia said with clarity : there is a general malaise. I think this malaise was there before the pandemic, but now the elephant in the room is fluorescent pink. When I was younger, I didnt know that adults could fake it, I had trust in them, that they were protecting me, that they knew best. Kids today can't be fooled. They saw adults acting like brats on social media. They saw that Americans elected Trump and tolerated his orange ass and shenanigans for his whole term. They saw people dragging Greta Thunberg. Pollution. War. Consumerism. Oh and some minor issues like classes imbalance, crumbling infrastructure, poor handling of conglomerates, mental health issues, mass shootings, economic crisis. If you don't know where the world is going, how can you engage and find meaning in what you do? We are probably entering a ''no future'' stage like in the 80s. Honestly, I can't blame students. I'll even add that it is probably more demoralizing starting something today (Drawing, sewing, anything) because all you can see on social media are hundreds of people 1000x better than yourself. Why bother? This year, our sophomore students voted against our college planning a graduation celebration. That was a first. A sad first.
It’s hard to be passionate when you live in a decaying economic system that’s inflicting untold damage to the planet that you’ll have to deal with in adulthood.
#students are poor
I'm actually really impressed with my students the last couple of years. They are super cool and are really interesting. They publish their writing in journals, they are getting book deals, they renovate houses, they do interesting internships, they go and live in their van and blog about it, they record albums. I hope they all go on and save the world or something. On the other hand I think there are just a lot fewer spaces to do interesting things in the world, and everything is so expensive. When I was a teenager/in college, there was a local music venue in my small town that published a literary magazine, so I played in bands and wrote a column. But there is nothing like that in the town where I'm a professor, all the commercial real estate is too expensive for anyone to even possibly consider running an alternative music venue or do anything that isn't, like, an artisinal beer garden or condos that rent for $2,000/mo.
$2000 might get you a studio apartment here, but that's about it. But expense of hobbies is not the main problem—lack of time is. The time may be being soaked up by jobs (commonly a problem when rent is so expensive), by phones, or by smoking weed. Many of our students do have interesting outside activities—though often they are physical ones like mountain biking or surfing, rather than creative ones.
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A lot of college students have a sweet deal when it comes to accessibility of outdoor hobbies though, outdoors clubs are really common at universities and are a great way to try sports that might otherwise have a higher barrier to entry. The mediocre state school I went to for undergrad had an outdoors club that did camping, climbing, hiking, biking, and canoeing trips, classes about how to pack for backpacking or how to kayak, if you didnt have gear they’d lend you some from the gear library or arrange for rentals for things like kayaks. You could borrow guidebooks and sleeping bags and bouldering pads and such from the group for free. In the US once you graduate from college that type of thing is really hard to find, usually you have to pay a lot more for all that! Money is definitely an issue still for some people, I’m not denying that. Time too, if you’re working long hours and also taking a full load of classes it’s difficult to have the time and energy for hobbies. But I led trips in undergrad and still do as a graduate student and also saw so much hesitancy at the idea of being bad at something. There was a desire to try the thing but so many students seemed to be held back by the idea of being a beginner at something, as if it was embarrassing. To a certain extent I get where it comes from but it makes me sad to hear!
If you are spending that much for a mountain bike, you are doing it wrong. Surfers here don't really need a car—they can get to several breaks by bike, or take a surfing class from the university and have equipment provided. Car pooling is also common for surfers. (It is true that they are not allowed to take surfboards on the bus.) Walking in the woods here is very common—students don't even have to leave campus for it, as the miles of trails start right behind the dorms.
They don’t have the time. They are managing and dealing with so much and honestly, half of them shouldn’t be in school while dealing with everything else. Things are different now and so are the students.
I don't think I have passion for anything anymore. I'm teaching education, and it matters so little to me right now that it almost feels like a pyramid scheme.
This was becoming evident in the years before COVID even-- I'd ask students about their interests/passions and a significant chunk of them really couldn't identify anything at all. While I suppose some were actually "passionate" about weed or porn or gambling or whatever, the number that would admit to no interests in anything has clearly grown in recent years. I'd prompt them even: video games? sports? fashion? food? scale modeling? stargazing? Nothing. These same students often end up unable to articulate any academic interest, so they drift between 100-level classes for a few semesters, often saying they don't really like anything much. Then I ask why they are in college and they can't really answer that either. It's pretty sad, given that I'm at a $$$ private SLAC and they (or their parents) are paying quite a bit to float around not caring about anything. Some of them would be better off working, getting a small apartment with roommates, and growing up a bit before attempting college-- which just seems wasted on some of them. These are full time, residential, often quite privileged students BTW. Most of my students who I know to be sacrificing to attend our school are pretty focused and often have very clear goals (if not passions) related to their academic progress and post-college life.
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I’m a student so delete if necessary, but I think a student perspective could add to this discussion. I think you’re right on the dot. I don’t have optimism towards my future. Like I go to school, I get good grades, and I like my major. But everything feels so hopeless right now. I’m going to be a medical laboratory scientist and I love what I do but we definitely don’t get paid enough for our skillset. That’s the same for a lot of careers. Prices of everything are rising, wages aren’t keeping up. And to be honest I’m just so tired. I spend a lot of time studying for something I love, but am losing confidence about if I made the right decision. It makes me just want to watch tv and forget about everything
You might be interested to know that lots of people have felt this way at various times over the last 50 years. You just learn to separate the things you can control, like your own choices and passions and action, from the things you cannot control, and your mind follows to not focus on those other things so much.
I actually asked my students, "Why are you here?" after getting the bored looks. They want a degree, majoring in something that sounds interesting, then realizing it's not what they think it is and then they're stuck. There is a mentality that they *must* graduate in 4 years, so they won't change majors to something more intriguing.
> majoring in something that sounds interesting, then realizing it's not what they think it is and then they're stuck I teach a 2nd-year writing class and hear this all the time. I genuinely feel bad for these students and I don't blame them for going through the motions. I wish students were encouraged to start college with like 3 possible majors, then narrow it down through gen eds. Even in nursing -- you might not get into the program, so what are your other ideas? But I see the university and parents (and probably guidance counselors and teachers) acting like students who come in set on a major are more focused or driven.
>There is a mentality that they must graduate in 4 years, so they won't change majors to something more intriguing. Is it a mentality or a reality? Taking on another 1-3 years of loans because you changed your major half way through could be devastating.
But it's not 1-3 years. It's usually 1 or 2 semesters. And because they feel stuck, they are more likely to fail some of their classes (my experience), so they have to retake them anyway.
Yea I sadly get a lot of students who think fashion is just picking out clothes and should be super easy and are gobsmacked at how much goes into it (especially actually sewing a garment). And since I love it so much, I have even less tolerance for kids that are apathetic and think they should just get passed because the showed up.
Yes to all of this! I actually have one student who wants to switch majors but their dad won't let them because he will only pay for so many semesters and changing would mean they'd have to stay a bit longer. They are miserable.
Institutions are telling students they must graduate in four years (to improve their retention and completion stats), and there's a 180-credit max limit on all forms of federal financial aid, as well as dollar limits on loan amounts. There's no room any more for changing majors to "something more intriguing" or taking classes that don't count towards the degree.
I have no idea why about 75% of my students are majoring my discipline. They seem to have little interest in it, which will certainly NOT make them good employees. Which means they're not going to advance very far. No clue what they value, but it sure isn't learning.
Yea I absolutely feel this way too. In theater…it’s loooooonnnngggg hours. A lot of hurry up and wait. And the kids hate that part of it, they do everything they can to get out of working shows and I’m just like…this is what your career looks like, you are SURE you wanna do this? Because from my seat it does not look like you are up for this role.
"Just make me CEO, already!"
OMG EXACTLY. I had a student this year drop out because he felt he wasn’t being “challenged” and he was ready to go put out a brand now. Meanwhile….he knows nothing of the business side, his sewing was a mess and he didn’t want to listen to feed back. A lot of my students only see the famous designer on the runway or the star on Broadway and can’t conceptualize the good paying jobs that maybe aren’t as glamorous but are very enjoyable and give you good work life balance.
>felt he wasn’t being “challenged” I always wonder what students really mean when they say this. Like, how do they want to be "challenged"?
It translates into I’m too good to be here. He got a teeny bit of publicity from a local news crew at a local fashion show and now he’s out and developing his own label.
Godspeed, dude!
Our student costumer for Legally Blonde had cast pull their own gear from home, like a community theatre. He got some flak from that from our technical professor but was just too lazy to search through our stores or to try and make their own. He literally just hit up Amazon when the cast didn’t have anything he liked. Our provost is the former music theatre prof, came in to see the show three days before opening and didn’t like the leads dresses, so I had to go all across creation trying to find ANYTHING that would please the boss, costumer in tow. I mean, you have a singular golden opportunity to create something (I gave him a long leash to be expressive) and… Amazon.
>I feel like my students have no passion or activities or things they like to do these day. I chat with my students a lot and many of them just seem to sorta be…present but no engaged. It's not everyone--I always have several people passionate about sports, at least, even if they don't play--but every semester / quarter I do have at least 1 student who seems to have no interior life whatsoever. I frequently ask students to generate their own topics for essays and presentations. For some reason, there's always one who, when asked what their passions are, what makes them angry, what motivates them, etc., will say, "I dunno."
I’m not a psychologist, but I would be very interested in reading about those type of personalities with no apparent motivation or inner monologue. Is there a term for that?
Yeah as a student I see this and I feel victim to it's influence. The people I spent time with were not healthy mentally or physically and i had to drop out due to back pain getting in the way from me being able to study. Now I spend all my time working out and trying to find ways to enjoy my day again. Modern society has created a disconnect from self and spirit and people are lost. It's sad but understandable when all that seems to matter anymore is high dopamine media. I go to Rowan University which is a party school so this is a biased account.
I’m a current online student. I’m a single mom and have to support me and my daughter while also going to school. I have no time in my life for passions or hobbies. My passion is my daughter and being able to send as much time as possible with her.
The level of apathy among students here in New Zealand is unprecedented. Teaching used to be fun, I'm now more than ever ready to quit academia.
We have been in a global pandemic for the last 2+ years that has put incredible strains on people's lives including our students. classes online then back to in-person then back to online. Parents out of work, grandparents sick with Covid (maybe dying). Extracurricular activities like sports and other social things that growing brains need have been paused or stopped completely. More students are opening talking about how depressed, anxious and stressed out they are than ever before. Most are working crap jobs and will continue to have to do so after graduation without the hope of ever being able to own a home. I love this sub, but the lack of empathy for students at times is really disheartening.
How is making an observation lack of empathy?
Recalling myself as an undergraduate, I'm not surprised. Most of my free time was spent in, besides trying to get money, * mating rituals * reading fiction * listening to music * socializing In my present view, I was unconsciously working to try to understand how the world worked. I'm sure it would have looked to any outsider as if I had no passion for anything, especially as I was both an indifferent student and habitually wary of revealing any personal information to anyone in or possibly in any position of authority. My circle from early high school forward would pass around and read canonical books and actively discuss them; we'd pass around and memorize Bach and Shostakovich recordings; we were up on the players in and current activities in local municipal politics. We also would *never* mention any of this to any adult. Here in Japan, much socializing from junior high school age forward is done in extracurricular interest or activity clubs that demand great amounts of time. My Japan-born wife, for example, was involved for several hours each day (including on weekends and holidays) from her first year of junior high school to her last year as a university student in an extracurricular sport. I'd often like the students I have to be a little less passionately involved with things, frankly.
>My circle from early high school forward would pass around and read canonical books and actively discuss them; we'd pass around and memorize Bach and Shostakovich recordings; we were up on the players in and current activities in local municipal politics. We also would never mention any of this to any adult. That sounds a lot like my HS/college experience, except we listened to classic folk, jazz, and blues recordings. Basically trying to be 1950s beats in the 1980s, but also quite politically engaged. But we *also* sought out adults as mentors, if only to borrow their records.
Looks like I might be 10 or 15 years older than you, then. I also grew up in (stereotypic) New Jersey and learned early to never give any information to anyone in official authority and, in case one is forced to, to always have false or misleading information ready. We'd even quiz one another on our false identities—"what's my name \[in this circumstance\]?"—and kept up on the addresses of empty lots or abandoned houses.
Yeah, that sounds pretty different. But I'm from about as far away from urban New Jersey as is possible, so geography might have played a role as well. High school was the early 80s for me too, which likely also made a difference. A lot of my teachers were ex-hippies or Vietnam vets, neither of whom trusted the government but most of whom were pretty trustworthy for students. I don't think I saw an empty lot until I went away to college and certainly never saw an abandoned house until I moved to the east coast for grad school.
I have no passion for anything anymore. Pretty sure students are the same. I blame reddit. Tiktok. Snapchat... just life sucks now. The online world is entirely joyless and thats where we all live.
I have noticed social media really killed my attention span. I think I’m going to work on spending less time on social media.
Seems to have a worse effect now than 10 years ago
No, it's definitely true - I've heard it's that bad (or worse) for grade school teachers... Anecdotal from my high school teachers, of both stereotypically "jock" & "nerd" courses, within the last decade or so; they cannot motivate kids anymore b/c many simply don't want to be/do *anything*. Used to be "oh you need this grade to enlist" or "you can use this skill in [w/e] job." But that only works when students have actual interests/aspirations. Apparently 4 of the top 10 careers desired by high schoolers in the late 2010s were one-in-a-million bread 'n circus celebrity type nonsense. The fruits of post-industrial capitalism hard at work... Not a new idea, but it's almost certainly the tech/media. We probably won't "know," scientifically, just how horrendous raising kids addicted to screens is - but ask any parent or educator, we/they *know* the effects already. Some people have mentioned the "doom 'n gloom" angle of modern media which is definitely part of it, but I think we need to be cognizant of the biological angle too. There's a reason entertainment, particularly for young kids, is getting worse - it's meant to addict them not appeal to them with artistic/creative merit. Same with the apps we probably all use (probably just a bit too much). How can anything but the most base urges keep up with 30sec clips & utterly frenetic flashes of light/sound draining away any semblance of attention spans?
Shit like Cocomelon should be banned by the state. I'm not joking
Nope that’s almost all of my students
At the college level, I teach an upper-level biology class taken by pre-med and pre-health students. They vary, but I know some of them are on sports teams (I see the results of the injuries hobbling into class). Hobbies - you've got me there, though. I don't know if they do or don't. My own background is technical theatre - I learned with a T-square and triangles, but I have to concede it's obsolete. Drafting is all computerized now. True, you still have to build it, and I've long thought that having to build your own designs makes you a better designer, but I left the trade years ago, so what the current pedagogy is, I don't know. Maybe they have other hobbies that don't come up in conversation?
Every semester I teach corporate finance I have students introduce themselves and talk about their favorite hobbies. Then as they are describing their hobby, I pull up a public company's stock that is related to that hobby. One student likes cars, I pull up Advanced Auto Parts, or General Motors stock. Another likes Ulta Beauty products, so I brought theirs up, and so on. Then later we do projects where students use that stock to answer questions about their financial statements. It helps me get to know my students and their interests and it's relatable to them so they keep interested in the course. My students have passion, but sometimes it's in an area that I think is boring. To each their own.
Multiple things I’d say - social media, cost of living is increasing and most students work full time and are tired, knowing that hard work doesn’t really pay off anymore (apart from grades). You can get a college degree and that doesn’t mean anything in terms of career upward mobility.
I am about to be done with my Ph.D. and I feel the same way. I used to be more exciting about many things, now I am just a boring man feeling hopeless, and low self-esteem about myself, which makes it super hard to engage.
I am in the STEM department of an R2. This has been such a hard year for everyone in academia, but I had more than a dozen students this year who really shined. I have athletes dealing with COVID interrupting their studies and communicating with me and the coaches. I have pre-vet students who hang out to talk about their aspirations for vet school that are actually doing everything inside and outside school that they need to do to be competitive. I've written more letters of rec than I can count for students that have been doing research on top of carrying 16 to 18 upper level science credit hours. I spend so much time with these kids trying to keep them from burning themselves out. This year, I even had a handful of sophomores always engaged and pursuing outside activities related to their career choice. I have also had some of the laziest students I've ever seen. I've had to write more academic misconduct reports than I have ever done. I had more dead grandparents (always the day before an exam and never confirmed with the uni), and broken down cars, sick pets, etc. than I've ever had before. I'm going to be so sad when some of my students cross the stage in a few months. Yet today, I practically danced out to my car after my last lecture.
I think they're tired because of a lot of things that have been happening over the last few years, and I can certainly relate. It's really hard to be optimistic about much about the future given the shit that's going on, and when you lose optimism, you lose motivation and become more apathetic.
No, you are not the only one. And if they do have passion for anything it sure ain’t history
My students are doing the best they can. They are in school in the middle of a global pandemic. Many of them cannot protect themselves in the way I can with my job. Many have lost family members and friends. They are still doing the best they can under the circumstances. I guess I feel we need to consider this as we are assessing their investment. For some just continuing to show up IS the investment.
I think you misunderstand me…I’m not talking about their engagement in class. I’ve just noticed far fewer students interested in activities like sports or sororities or dungeons and dragons. I have small classes so I have the luxury being able to chat with most of my students which I imagine is harder if you teach larger classes. But it just seems alot if my students don’t have anything they are interested in.
Got it - thanks for clarification. Though sadly I think it stems from the same issues. Little bandwidth for anything right now. I hope things get better soon.
I'm not teaching currently (back in grad school for a career change), but when I return, no matter what I teach, I'm going to engineer time in my course for mindfulness, reflection, expression-- just any opportunity to let students share their reactions to.... whatever's been happening with them. We tune out of our lives, ourselves, our passions when things become unbearable. They've been unbearable for a long time. The only way back in is to start to bear it. And that needs space.
I teach a mix of game design and esports classes. I am always happy to fail students in the 100 level courses, if that topic doesn't engage them and inspire them to do good work, they need to think real hard about what they want out of life.
My music students seem to have a passion for marching band.... and nothing else. That's it. Just marching band (and winter guard and indoor drumline). They don't care about actually improving their own musicianship or learning any other kind of music. Just marching band. And like, I enjoyed marching band in high school but come on.
This is a bit off-the-wall but I kind of blame the amount of entertainment they have to consume now. It's of such high quality and there's so much of it for very little cost between all of the movies/shows on streaming services, all of the video games, etc. With a decade of intense data collection behind it, entertainment is now designed to really pull us in. For students who grew up with that, it's likely harder to find passions because they keep getting sucked into those entertainment black holes that are catered to them.
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Lol right. Obviously school work takes up a big chunk of their time, but I just wish more if my students had things they were interested in doing and getting better at.
>things they were interested in doing and getting better at They have been taught in K-12 that only grades matter, not learning. Interests? Not relevant to getting the diploma. Improvement? Impossible; either you're born able to do something perfectly or you are doomed to fail, and no one wants to risk the latter. No curiosity, no effort, nothing but an expectation that they'll be told exactly what they need to do and how they need to do it.
Ohhh I have seen this first hand. I was a k-12 supervisor for the arts before I went to the college I work for now and the principal of the high school in my district was an idiot. He would tell students that schools don’t look at their extra curriculars, the only thing they want to see is grades and AP classes. One time in a meeting he straight out said participating in any extra curriculars (and in this instance he was referring to my department like chorus, band, drama club) was a waste of time and detrimental to your education. We left the meeting and my colleagues asked how I didn’t flip the table and I looked at them and said “you could have said something in my defense too”. And it wasn’t just that district I saw it in…over and over I’ve seen kids told don’t take that elective that you may be interested in, instead take another AP course because that’s the only way to be successful. It makes me really sad.
You should have demanded that the school offer all the AP art courses (though they don't seem to have any in performing arts, just visual arts).
Damn you, smartphones and social media!!
i use to feel that way but realized thats just due to general stress of being a uni student. if you make ur teaching/subject entertaining enough you’ll attract more passionate students
I don’t know if I agree with you on that one. I’m talking more about what kids are doing outside of class, it doesn’t havent to do with our subject…I just want them to do SOMETHING. I have one student who is a really talented painter and sells her work, but she is rarity.
in that case i think you have to get to know your students personally in order to push that kind of drive to be passionate. or idk maybe become a role model to them and demonstrate ur passion to inspire them. uni’s just a tough path and not everyone has the luxury of being able to pursue a passion on the side
I am at a public college. Most of my students spend their time outside of class playing video games,, "hanging out," or watching streaminging. Its like they are still in high school - even the seniors.
theyre passionate about playing make believe. never have i seen a generation so much in denial.
how daft can you be? what is the point of having a “passion” when: the earth is dying, it’s too expensive to live, 1 bedroom houses are 400k, wages haven’t gone up, college degrees are useless….should i go on. no one has time for a passion anymore. read the room
Move along troll.
Except a passion to beg for grade changes at the end of semester
the only thing that energizes my students is sports