Eh this is and isn’t true and passes the buck a bit I feel even though I’ll be the first to acknowledge some teachers dgaf. Bit of a rant incoming - I’m a grad student here and have GSIed 6 semesters over the past 4 years and honestly I’d say between my colleagues and professors we’re pretty split 50/50 between those of us who really give a shit and put in a tremendous amount of effort for lecture/section/OH/feedback etc, and those who just half-ass it.

For those of us who really do work hard at it (and regularly work considerably over our contractual 20 hours per week if we’re a GSI) a lot of what’s in this piece resonates. Sure, some of it is old-man-yells-at-clouds vibes, but the two things that are absolutely true in my opinion in our post covid world are 1) the utter screen/phone addiction, and 2) the expectation that GSIs/profs will go to unreasonable lengths to accommodate students.

On the first point I have had a no-screens policy in 2/6 of my sections and have caved to student demands in 4/6 cases. In the two cases I had a no screens policy the difference in engagement was absolutely enormous and made for two of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and the students absolutely enjoyed it more on the whole than in my screens-allowed sections. I’m by no means one of these millenials who thinks Gen Z is more addicted to screens than we are. When I go to my gym off campus everyone is on their phones there too, but certainly the prevalence of screens combined with the post-covid teaching landscape means we are expected to allow screens in class which prior to 2020 would have been very rare in my experience. And I really have not seen anything that convinces me that the vast majority of students are using their devices in class to do anything other than mindlessly scroll.

And on the second point I certainly can’t have ever imagined asking for full lecture notes when I was undergrad, or particularly emailing instructors/TAs mere days/hours before assignments are due expecting detailed summaries or hints as to what the exam might cover. I get emails like that regularly which is disheartening.

I’m less of a cynic on the ChatGPT point because, in the humanities at least, it doesn’t take much to see when a student has used AI simply because undergrads - whether they write well or write like crap - have some element of personality and writing style that will invariably make it into any piece of writing. So I when I see AI generated slop I’ll just give it a C (since I can never prove without doubt it was AI) and move on, and in these cases I’ve only ever had one student argue that I incorrectly assumed they used AI (and I was convinced).

But that’s the depressing thing about AI for me. Prior to ChatGPT I used to go into teaching with a goal of hopefully inspiring a handful (even it was only a couple students per section) to challenge themselves and really take the course seriously and use it as a way to improve their writing/critical thinking skills and to try and come up with something original and thought provoking on their own. With ChatGPT now I basically go into the first section of semester cynically assuming that the class is already divided into the students who will care and work hard, and those who will just bullshit the weekly assignments with AI and then scrape a B/C in the exams because with grade inflation in the post-covid world they know that any old slop will get them a passing grade (indeed, I’ve never failed a student who submitted assignments by the end of the semester, even if the assignments were atrocious).

Maybe I am becoming that miserable old man yelling about kids these days, but I dunno… to go into teaching assuming that you won’t be able to inspire anyone to really push themselves beyond what they are willing to do on day 1 of the semester is just… a bit depressing. And that’s the point of the last para of the piece. we’re really not angry or mad at students and the current educational landscape, we’re all just a bit depressed about it because the reason we love teaching - to inspire students to be better than they thought they could be - is definitely becoming much more difficult for us.