On Apathy

 Sigh... Where to begin??

    In my previous post I mentioned how apathy drove me out of the classroom. I should clarify a bit in that I didn't really want to be there in the first place, so it didn't take much. But most public educators would agree that student apathy is becoming an epidemic of biblical proportions. "Biblical" doesn't quite cover it, when you realize that most of the stories in the Bible took place in a tiny portion of the world. This is a worldwide issue, much bigger than "biblical proportions". Even "epidemic" is too small. This is bigger than a pandemic. COVID affected fewer people than apathy does. I'd like to blame smartphones, but I'm not sure they are the source. Surely, they are providing a huge contribution to the problem, but I think the source lies elsewhere. I will start with smartphones because they are the most visible source, then move to what I believe is the underlying cause. I hope. I'm not sure I have a belief as to the underlying cause. Hopefully, I will discover it before I get to that part of this post.

    Smartphones. Awesome? Evil? Somewhere in between? You decide your own thoughts on them, but for the purposes of this essay I will remain neutral on smartphones in general and focus on their role in apathy. It can't be denied that student apathy bloomed into the monster that it is today as a direct result of children having access to smartphones. (And other screens, cry the victims of the iPad generation, but let's keep this simple.) I started my career in a high school, but left in 2009, long before smartphones were a high school problem. I moved to a middle school where I remained stuck (a story for a different post) until 2015. I moved back to a high school at that time and was confronted with the beast that smartphones had become. It didn't sneak up on me over time and perhaps that is why it drove me to near madness before I could escape the classroom completely. At the time I left the middle school, it seemed that parents still had a tight enough reign on smartphones that those aged children weren't so dependant on them. But at the high school? Oh boy...

    Every single student had one, permanently attached to their hand, eyes glued all day long. At first, I was happy for it since my classroom was lacking in desktop computers and the students did not have their own school-issued laptop yet. (That would happen a few years later.) I asked them to use their phones during class to help with lessons. It worked great until I realized that yes, they were using them for class purposes, but also for more, much more. I quickly learned when Snapchat dropped a new filter. You could tell by the student's faces and how they were interacting with their phones. I also learned to tell the difference between what activity, and even down to the specific app, they were engaged in on their phones by their faces and body language. This is not a skill I want to have, but here we are.  

    As the monster grew, it became harder and harder to teach. The students were engaged with the monster in their own battle. They were ill-equipped to fight this monster. We all were. We've failed as a society to win this battle. We don't have the coping skills and to make it worse we are just now finding out the consequences of our failure. No, it's not a battle, it's a war.  

    Off to war we go, with no boot camp to prepare us. And just like war (as if I will ever really know having never been myself) it changes us, drains us, and leaves us empty shells of who we used to be.  Many people lose the enthusiasm they had for their careers as a younger person just starting. We all start out thinking we can change the world and slowly realize that it is the world that changes us. (We change the world in equal measure, but that is a different post.) The thing that changed me and made me lose that way of thinking? Apathy. Not mine, I'd like to say, but in truth it's hard not to let the energy surrounding you seep into your soul. I fought my own battles with apathy. I didn't always win.  

    Do you have any idea how hard it is to get 30 teenagers (notoriously rebellious in the first place) to engage in school (the horror) when there is the entire world at their fingertips? A world full of wonder and newness, and hilarity, and attention-draining short clips. How can anyone fight this battle and win?  How can I turn my classroom into something even more attention-grabbing than the entire Internet??? I can't. No one can. This battle can't be fought in the schools, it has to be fought elsewhere. I'm not even sure it can be fought at home, as much as it would be easy to simply blame parents. This permeates the whole of society and our culture. It is too big for me. It is too big for any one school or district or county or state or country. This is a pandemic, something the entire world's governments need to work together to solve. And we all know how good we are at cooperating.

    Apathy sucks and you can't fight it by yourself. So don't. Do something else. Find your way out and into something that engages you. It's not easy. It took me years, but sometimes wars take a long time and are filled with many different battles. You win some, you lose some. But you have to keep fighting.  If you don't, apathy wins. But how do you fight an enemy you know nothing about? (Here's the part where I attempt to figure out the underlying cause.)

    What is apathy? Where does it come from? idc

    I do though, I'm too curious and stubborn. Teenagers not caring about school is nothing new, but the extent of this has become huge. So huge that it can't be explained by "oh that's just teenagers" anymore. It's something else. Especially because it's not just teenagers anymore, it's everyone, it's everywhere. I think it's because humans require a reason. We need a reason to get up in the morning. Look at everything going on in the world. Climate change, political nonsense, division, war, rising costs, gig culture. It's too much all at once and we are aware of it in a way we've never been before because of smartphones. Not even the Internet. Yes, the Internet gave us the background structure to be able to spread news far and wide immediately, but we still didn't have immediate access until smartphones came along. Now we are connected 24/7 with, as the meme goes, a brain designed to eat berries in a cave.

    It's hard to care when there's so much to care about. Overwhelming really. So we shut down and refuse to care about anything except the next dopamine hit. Do we really need to stay as informed as we are? How do we fight against the world's problems if we don't know about them? I suppose this was the point in having a representative democracy. We elect some people to pay attention for us while we pay attention to the details of our lives. Too bad they are doing a crap job at it. Now we have to pay attention ourselves and we're overwhelmed by it. If we can fix that maybe we can get the ability to care to trickle back down. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. I still care enough to think it's worth a shot.