It's the children who are wrong

As I stood at the front of the classroom, my laptop connected to a carefully crafted presentation on large language models, I felt a wave of pride. This class was my baby, six months of research, experiments, and talking to other experts distilled into a single class. I had practiced my class outside of school with friends both in person and online, they were filled with curiosity and engagement. But with my students? The enthusiasm wasn’t just missing, it felt like it had been sucked out of the room.

Two students left the classroom early on, leaving their laptops behind. It wasn’t unusual, students sometimes step out for a phone call, a quick smoke (which I don't appreciate but, hey, they're adults), or a bathroom break. I figured they'd be back in a few minutes.

They returned an hour and a half later, casually mentioning to a group of students (and to me, as I stood right there) that they had gone to smoke pot. Not just “stepped outside”, but openly admitted to choosing that over my class. I wasn’t angry, just… sad. Sad that my carefully designed lesson, something I hoped they would find interesting after hearing them talk about AI for months, was worth less to them than getting high.

I’m not really letting two students get to me, but the frequency of this kind of disengaged behavior is growing. Another moment that stands out was what I now call "the Fortnite incident". It was the first time I got genuinely angry and raised my voice in class, and it surprised even me.

A student called me over during a lecture while still actively playing Fortnite. When I approached, he held up a finger and said, "Wait a second". So that he could get to a safe spot in the game.

I couldn’t believe it. My frustration boiled over, and for the first time, I told a student to leave and come back next week. It felt disrespectful, not just to me, but to the entire class.

Then, about a month ago, there was the student who wasn’t even enrolled in my class. She approached me during a break to ask that I not call on her because she wasn’t actually taking the course. Naturally, I asked why she was there, to which she responded, "out of interest." For a brief moment, I was happy and a bit flattered, and I said, "If you're interested in my class, why wouldn't I let you participate in it?"

"Oh, I’m not interested in the material," she clarified. "I’m interested in my friends."

Dear reader, I was too stunned to respond. I assumed she’d leave when class resumed, but she didn't. And at that point I just lacked the backbone to send her out.

These moments weren’t isolated incidents. From the start of the semester, I noticed a shift in behavior, a lack of engagement, a casual disregard for classroom etiquette, and an overall atmosphere that felt more like high school than higher education.

Halfway through the semester, I realized it wasn’t just the students who needed to change. I needed to change too. My lectures, no matter how carefully crafted, weren’t landing anymore. But with increasing class sizes growing too large for good practical instruction as I can't troubleshoot for 70 students, I felt stuck in a system that wasn’t working.

I won’t pretend I’ve handled this semester perfectly. My frustration with disengaged students started to bleed into how I treated the engaged ones. I lumped them all together, grew angry, and if I’m honest, wanted to win them over in a way. When I failed to get them actively engaged, it just made me feel even more sad. I’m learning to let that go.

Technology isn’t helping either. Large language models, ironically the subject of one of my last class, are also part of the problem. Students no longer ask me questions. Instead they ask AI. It’s faster, easier, and requires less effort than engaging with the material. But the shortcut comes at a cost: a shallow understanding that won’t hold up in the real world, or just straight-up wrong answers, and the time they spend chatting with the AI they are missing on instruction.

I know I can’t go back to the way things were. I need to rethink my approach by crafting in-class assignments that break up lectures and encourage collaboration. Assignments that can’t be outsourced to AI, forcing students to engage with each other and the material in ways only humans can. I'll let you know if I ever figure that one out as my lectures are all in the field of computer science.

I’m also talking to colleagues and students, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Teaching in a changing world is a challenge, but it’s one I’m committed to facing.

Because at the end of the day, maybe the students aren’t entirely wrong. Maybe neither am I. But something needs to change.