The students are broken

 For all the bright, shiny "new normal" talk that is permeating academia, we are aggressively ignoring the fact that the kids are not ok. Bun is now in high school (long-time readers might remember their birth), so I had something of an advantage over my colleagues of seeing the public school experience up close last year. The entire grade was done from my dining room. And we were lucky - Spouse teaches pretty much all giant lecture-sized classes that did not fit in the rooms on his campus with distancing, so he was on line all year as well, so at least someone was home. Spouse was in front of his green screen in the basement and Bun in the black box in the dining room. To say education sucked mightily last year would be a tremendous understatement. Never have I been so grateful to not be a public school teacher because they were in the mother of all lose-lose situations. 

The combination of how school went last year and the reality that we are still living in a global pandemic took every kind of toll on learners imaginable, and deciding that distancing didn't matter and masks are keen did not, in itself, undo the damage of a lost year and a half. 

My students were already not great at interpersonal interaction. The year in the black box seems to have changed their idea of what education is supposed to be. I had a class of first-years this fall that was the worst of my career by quite a bit. They were just a mass of anxiety and disengagement that made them unwilling to engage with the live class they were in at all. It's not that they are bad kids or incapable. They aren't. But they are broken. The 40-ish hours I had with them are definitely not enough to repair all the damage. At Bun's high school, things are still broken. Truly heroic things are being asked of the staff, as the legislature in New State has decided a whimsically incoherent policy wherein all instruction is to be perfectly normal and you are just as accountable according to the Department of Education and people can't come to school if they are positive according to the Department of Health and we have yet to manufacture a department of creating new competent people to meet both of those goals. Our new product we get in college will continue to be damaged. I think we will continue to ignore this fact.