Alena Selezneva
Years ago, my beloved friend the late historian Julius Scott told me something that one of his mentors, the late historian Larry Goodwyn, told him about teaching. The lesson has stuck with me for decades, and I have to remind myself of it before and after each academic term: If a course goes well, you can’t take too much credit. And if it goes poorly, you can’t heap all the blame on yourself.
That felt true, but now I’m wondering if I’m the problem.
For most of the two decades I’ve been teaching creative nonfiction, I have felt like it’s a gift to be able to share works I admire with students who start out thinking the genre is boring and then love all the reading and show up to class eager to discuss. I never had students skip class. They rarely came unprepared.
That is, until the last few years. These days, I’m less sure than I’ve ever been about my role in the classroom. Is it because I’m burned out and not as enthusiastic? Am I teaching material that no longer resonates? Are students too anxious and depressed to be able to focus? Can I blame them, given these times, for being anxious and depressed?
In conversations with faculty friends from across the country and a wide range of institutions, I know many of us are feeling a bit lost. And maybe Larry Goodwyn’s wisdom doesn’t apply anymore. Maybe the blame really does lie with me—not because I’ve become a crappy teacher, though that’s possible, but because students have changed and, well, I haven’t.
Over the years I’ve tried a zillion techniques to manage seminar discussions. I ask big talkers to wait for three or four others to weigh in before they speak again, but these days students are too nice to shut anyone down. They don’t like to be called on, as we know, so we’ve brought in plush toys—how delighted students were to introduce me to something called a Squishmallow, which I persisted in calling the Squishy—and tossed them around as a kind of talking stick. Allowing a little physical chaos in a discussion session can make things less stressful, though often it happened that I was the one who needed the comfort of holding such a toy and ended up bogarting the Squishy. Now I use eye contact to catch students who look like they have something to say. Sometimes it works.
In the last couple of years, students told me they prefer to work in small groups because, they say, they want friends. I know that Generation Pandemic has been missing out socially and need to be able to connect with other two-legged critters.
But there are often dudes who have no interest in doing anything other than gaming in their parents’ basements who carp that this isn’t useful. This fall one guy expressed his displeasure at having to actually talk to his peers. I shouldn’t have set up class this way, he challenged.
I asked what the class thought was my reasoning.
One young woman said, “Because it’s what we said we wanted at the beginning of the quarter.”
Yup, I said. And also, because this is the way most of the world works. I reminded them that once they graduate (though I know that some of them will not actually earn a degree, because I teach at a regional comprehensive and I refuse to ignore the statistics), they will be expected to work as part of a team. Employers tell us that the generation leaving our campuses don’t have what they need to be useful members of the workforce. So this is a way, I explained, to help you not only learn the material for our course but to help build skills for whatever comes next. Some nodded; others responded with the Gen Z stare.
But here’s the thing: I’m trying all these techniques as if the problem is just about finding the right pedagogical trick to revive the kinds of robust discussions I had taken for granted. What if the problem is that I’m still teaching as if it’s 2015? We read, we talk, we write. Is that still the right way? Maybe the problem really is me.
I want to help students develop skills they need to get what they want after they leave campus—jobs, careers, admission to whatever they think will bring them the goodies. And I want to show them how the world has changed right before their eyes and that they can use AI as a tool. And I want them to want to embrace the beautiful struggle of doing hard intellectual work alone and with the assistance of other minds. But many of them just don’t want to go along with that program. And I know I can’t want that more for them than they want it for themselves.
A tenured professorship is a luxury, as many who have not gotten so lucky should be quick to remind me. I like to say I hopped on the last gravy train as it was leaving the station. But these days I’m unsure about what I’m doing in the classroom, or why I’m doing it, and how I could be more useful to a crop of students who are entering a world vastly different from even a decade ago.
And there’s something else that’s even harder to talk about but impossible to ignore. For a number of years, I have been afraid of some of my students. They are easily triggered, sometimes by things I cannot anticipate, and also quick to pull the trigger to take down those who say things they don’t like. This used to be only metaphorical.
Now none of us can feel safe from the disaffected in our classrooms. Nearly two decades ago, a graduate student made his contempt for me so clear I had to ask two large guys to walk me to my car after our night classes. The hesitantly soft-spoken student seemed harmless, and yet he scared me. A few years later, I learned he’d been arrested for beating up his girlfriend.
I still believe with my whole heart and battered soul in the transformative value of a traditional liberal arts education. I just wonder if there’s a way to keep the best of that in the world of 2026 and beyond.
And I wonder if Larry Goodwyn would revise his advice for this moment: When the class goes poorly, maybe I do need to heap blame on myself. Not for failing, but for not adapting well enough to everything that has changed in just the last few years. I’d like to believe that great teachers, like Larry, like Julius, would have found ways to evolve and to show me the path.
