The Soft-Pants Effect

Each of us, students and educators alike, craves a return to normal. First came the full pandemic shutdown, and then we tried hybrid teaching models, attempting to balance health and public safety with educational and social-emotional needs. Then we declared the pandemic over, but that was a farce. As the United States and countries around the world attempt to adjust to post-pandemic classrooms and systems of education, concerns continue to emerge about student adjustment, learning and resilience.

Students are struggling. Educators are struggling, too. Despite the desire for normal, from kindergarten through college, the kids (and their instructors) are still not OK.

The sixth graders can’t tolerate thirst. They get up to fill their water bottles in the middle of their lessons. Their teacher hesitates to stop them. The students are used to constant access to the refrigerator, to the kitchen faucet, to the snack cabinet. Will a 12-year-old experience dehydration during third period, or are they just kind of thirsty?

There is more to pandemic recovery than learning loss or trauma or burned-out teachers. There is something different about our students—and, again, those in college as well as K-12. It sometimes looks like ADHD: the inability to stay seated, to follow directions, to stay on task with a lesson or lecture. It sometimes resembles slow processing speed or short-term memory deficits, leading to poor performance and missed assignments. It can manifest as anxiety, with its avoidance, indecisiveness and torment over a deadline. It can come across as depression, with its irritability and low motivation. At times, we wonder if it is, at least in part, defiance born of pandemic educational habits.

But we’ve also seen the opposite of defiance—a curious passiveness. “Professor?” a college student asks. “I just threw up in the bathroom.” The student pauses, paralyzed by uncertainty: “What should I do?” “Go home,” answers the professor. “Get some rest, drink plenty of fluids and call the health center if you don’t feel better soon.” Should a college student know that already?

The uncertainty shows up in academic work, too. Students seem more tentative, unsure than they did before. A simple assignment to create an outline for a paper brings questions like “What do you mean by an outline?” “Is there a template?” “Can you provide an outline for the assignment?” (An outline about an outline?) Wasn’t this covered in high school? Or is the deficit not about academics?

All this makes teaching harder. Teaching strategies that worked before fall flat now. You could turn on Taylor Swift and dance in front of your class (one of us has done this) or fashion a water wheel out of a potato and some toothpicks (one of us has done that), but the success wears off quickly. Students seem engaged in the moment, but then the anxiety, the distraction and the sluggishness creep back in. The consensus at both of our institutions—and we’re not alone—is this: our students have not returned as they were. Something is not right.

We must acknowledge that each of us has taught at relatively affluent institutions, with their attendant privileges. Independent schools and private colleges and universities have been arguably at a distinct advantage both during and after the pandemic in multiple regards. Our students, more often than not, have been in relatively amenable home situations, many with parents in white-collar jobs that can be conducted from the kitchen table without significant threat of unemployment or housing disruptions. The challenges, though real, have in many ways been more at the level of an angst-filled disruption than the nightmarish losses and cumulative traumas that many communities—particularly communities and individuals of color, marginalized identities, and socioeconomic disadvantage—have endured.

In fact, for some of our students, remote education was a gift. Unencumbered by distracting classmates and extracurricular activities, students had the freedom to indulge in hours of reading or exploring topics outside classes: urban planning, the banjo, writing a first novel. They may have benefited from home-cooked meals, the family washing machine, the comforts of their home. This is not meant to downplay the extraordinary challenges of the pandemic; it is meant to highlight that at least a portion of our students incurred distinct advantages from the reduced demands—personal, social and academic—they experienced during the pandemic. Those reduced demands showed up most visibly in our clothing. Many of us spent our days in leggings, pajamas, joggers—days and days and days of soft pants.

The soft pants that became so ubiquitous during the pandemic have simply stuck around—a Soft-Pants Effect, as the two of us have come to refer to it. Look around a typical middle school classroom. Not one kid is wearing jeans or corduroys or even cargo pants. There are no buttons. No rivets. No belts. The college set shows more diversified garb, but it’s hard not to wonder if the frequency of requests to attend class via Zoom is, in fact, a desire to stay under the covers and in pajamas. Hard pants are so 2019! Does it matter? We think it might.

We worried so much about the mental health of our students during COVID that many faculty members chose and were encouraged by their institutions to provide extra time, ungraded coursework and deadline extensions. Life was so very stressful already that we did everything we could to reduce distress. Now, two years later, we find ourselves, as educators, careening towards burnout. Not because we have lost our love of teaching, but because our effective pre-COVID strategies have stopped working.

Leaning into challenge and discomfort—whether in examining a difficult text in an English literature class, learning to master a laborious mathematics skill or tolerating thirst long enough to hear the end of a lesson or lecture—are essential components of deep and enduring learning. Yet our students seem unable, perhaps unwilling, to meet these small challenges.

Marsha Linehan, the developer of dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, offers a lens through which to understand the importance of how we tolerate distress. According to Linehan, the ability to tolerate painful or uncomfortable emotions and situations without becoming overwhelmed by them is crucial to mental health. Have we let our students opt out of the uncomfortable—of developing this skill? Are the proverbial soft pants a visual representation of the reduced mental and physical stamina in our students?

We watch our students struggle to see a project through, to puzzle out abstract theories, to solve problems step by step. We watch them struggle with feedback. Ideally, feedback offers a momentary challenge followed by a path to progress. During the pandemic, students received feedback less often and with fewer consequences. The ability to tolerate distress long enough to change behavior because it’s a struggle has become a barrier to growth and authentic learning.

We recognize the risk of repeating age-old habits of blaming students for our own shortcomings. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we see an unprecedented time and also an opportunity to try a new tack. Could it be that teaching students to tolerate distress—to experience discomfort gracefully, to exercise flexible thinking in the face of challenge—might be the way to move past pandemic learning? We think it’s worth a try.

Hard-Pants Days

So we did. We had not known each other, but a colleague—a consultant and expert in instructional design who noticed similar themes emerging in our discussions of barriers to student engagement, learning and general resilience and well-being—introduced us. And after sharing our experiences, we felt compelled to collaborate. In each of our classrooms, we declared a Hard-Pants Day.

Yes, we asked our middle schoolers and our college students to wear restrictive clothing for no other reason than to share the experience of mild discomfort or at least a change of habits. One of us chose slacks for the occasion, the other high-waisted jeans, pulled from the hinterlands of our respective closets. We committed to the work of hard pants together. Students could, alternatively choose a necktie, blouse with buttons, shoes made of leather and so on—something that offered their bodies some resistance. It felt countercultural, a gentle form of resistance. Maybe it would serve as a reminder throughout the day that we can endure. We can tolerate discomfort. We can sit with distress. We are strong, and we are stronger together.

Some students raised an eyebrow, some seemed unaffected, one or two forgot the assignment and showed up in sweats, and a few asked questions that led to a deep discussion about how the pandemic has changed them, about what they missed attending months or years of classes from their bedrooms in Zoom-wear and about what they learned about themselves in this Hard-Pants Day experiment. Some noted their hard pants helped them feel more prepared for the day, more awake and upright in their seats, ready to learn. Another questioned the premise, offering that the pandemic made them harder, not softer. Another offered that they didn’t want things to go back to how they were before the pandemic, with hard deadlines and limited flexibility and at the same time noted they felt underprepared for the “real world” with college graduation just months away.

Most of all, the Hard-Pants Day experiment got them talking. They talked about how they were struggling, about how discussions like this— about their well-being—were helpful to them and about the things that were not helpful, like too much flexibility, which led to poor planning, procrastination and heightened anxiety. Together in our hard pants, difficult conversations felt softer.

Certainly, a single day in “ouchie pants” (from little-kid lexicon) will not turn education around. It will not bring us back to pre-COVID ways of being. Maybe that’s not even a goal. Learning to tolerate distress takes practice and skill. Just as a parent helps their young child learn to ride a bike by gradually increasing the challenge and reducing the supports, we too must purposefully and mindfully scaffold our young children and our college students alike as they build these skills of living and failing and persevering. We may aspire to live carefree lives, but removing all of the barriers undermines the satisfaction that comes with overcoming adversity.

Start small. Help students practice the skill of metacognition or the process of thinking about thinking. Assigning reflections that ask students to respond to prompts like “What was your biggest hurdle in this assignment?” and “What strategy did you employ to overcome your struggle?” can help raise student awareness about the challenges inherent in learning and their ability not only to master the material but also to develop strategies to cope.

Pair high expectations with support for students, incrementally increasing the challenges while setting students up for success. Break down projects into component parts. Scaffold independence in learning and build on what works. The goal is for all students to reach mastery of the material. Some will get there more easily or more quickly than others, and that is to be expected. Learning is not linear. By taking a mastery-based approach to teaching and modeling adaptability and patience for persistence, you are helping students learn to tolerate the negative emotions that can come with challenge, to resolve barriers to learning and to be flexible in their approach even if it is uncomfortable. Sure, they may protest at first; perhaps they won’t like it, and that’s OK. Generations of students before them have protested!

Help your students develop tolerance for discomfort and a growth mind-set by changing the way you talk about learning and give feedback. Using language such as “not yet” or “almost there” helps students understand that learning is a process not an endpoint, and that abilities are developed, not fixed. Praise your students for their hard work, their use of effective strategies and perseverance on challenging assignments and in mastering complex concepts. Normalize that deep learning is hard work, as Louis Deslauriers, director of science teaching and learning at Harvard University, describes. Effort is not a sign of failure—it’s one of learning.

As post-pandemic instructors, can we find the balance of flexibility and structure that builds distress tolerance and fosters deep learning? Let’s help our students lean into the discomfort and experience the failure that precedes the thrill of mastery. Practice, practice, practice.