#just for me to see her on the popular student facebook page

Truly I love my job and I love teaching, but there are times (like right now), when I feel actual existential despair about the quality of students’ work and how quickly it has declined even over just a few years.

Nothing about my course has changed recently (literally–it’s an online class, and I recorded all the lectures and video walkthroughs before the pandemic!), but the essays I’m reading this semester are… To be frank, most of them aren’t even legible, let alone college-level writing.

Even those which are grammatically clear enough to be easily read seem to be almost entirely devoid of actual thought. I see the same exact talking points from my own lessons being parroted back without any change, any additions, or even any citations.

I know kids are burnt out and overwhelmed by things happening in the real world right now. I know that. We know there was learning loss during the pandemic, obviously.

But… professors have a legal (and really, a moral) obligation not to pass students out of core courses until they’re actually capable of the required skills, because then the students are passed onto into higher level classes which they are unprepared for and cannot pass, costing them thousands of dollars more in tuition (or worse, the unprepared students are passed through those classes tooand end up causing damage in the real world due to an inability to think critically or communicate clearly to others).

I’m exhausted and heartsick over this. I am so worried for the future.