Make Them Believers
A public high school teacher has some insights for college professors
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Kids these days, right? Every generation says it about the next. My generation demanded the instant gratification of nearly a hundred cable channels, but today’s youth have upped the ante. Obsessed with clicks and likes, they crave virtual acknowledgement. They are the first generation to live under the allure of perpetual digital connectivity, with social media sometimes more real to them than their parents, teachers, and peers. Our real world is not their reality, and our youth are more reluctant than ever to make face-to-face contact.
Public schools are now combating this addiction, at least during the school day. As an English teacher at a public high school in central New York, I welcomed a major change when classes started up in fall 2025: School districts in the state began complying with a new law banning cell phone use (and personal Wi-Fi devices like earbuds) during the school day. Gone are doomscrolling study halls and silent cafeterias. Instead, our students are talking to each other over their crinkle-cut fries rather than IM’ing a pal across the table. This is happening elsewhere, as well. In 2023, Florida became the first state to limit phones in school. Currently, twenty states ban student use of phones, tablets, and other wireless communication devices during the school day. Countries including China, France, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, and South Korea have also limited phone use in their schools. In an even stricter approach, in December 2025, Australia became the first nation to ban social media use for children under sixteen, with other countries such as Denmark, Norway, and France looking to follow suit.
How is it going in our schools, you ask? Quite well, so far. Less cheating. Less inappropriate use of AI. Our students are more engaged in class discussions, STEM labs, literature lessons, the complexity of foreign languages, and the discovery of historical connections to current events. They are revisiting the virtues of critical thinking, brainstorming, and cooperative learning. When problem solving, they consult one another, not their phones. In October 2025, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported positive results from Florida’s phone ban, including higher student test scores in the ban’s second year and fewer unexcused student absences, which may be a factor in the improved test results.
The students coming to your colleges and universities in fall 2026 will bring back the banter of academic debates if you sponsor them in this digital detox. Don’t let their old habits return. They have the rest of their day to insta-snap-gram-tok all they want. In your class, channel their renewed spirits. Get to know them as the unique individuals they are, and you will love them. They will remind you why you got into teaching in the first place. But this is just one insight for the college and university faculty who will soon have these high schoolers on their campuses. Here are a few others based on my teaching experiences.
Honor the leap students took in choosing your campus. They’ve made the decision to enroll at your institution. Make them believers in your courses and lessons. Some will have big dreams, while others will flounder as they seek inspiration to find their way. Think of the journey that set them upon your doorstep. Part of their academic pilgrimage is unique to their generation. They were in junior high when the COVID-19 pandemic slowed their academic lives to a crawl. Some of them have not yet fully regained their footing as reduced standards and lenient grading policies passed them forward. Soon they will be your newest students, and you must support them.
Many incoming college students, for all intents and purposes, have just spent a senior year of high school and a summer coasting academically. When they were eleventh graders, they were focused, having been warned for years of impending standardized tests, SATs, ACTs, and Advanced Placement exams. Yet once they receive their college acceptance letters, many students basically shut down academically for months. After all, they earned it, right? The admissions process was grueling. Now they did it. Back off and let me be a kid again! The new students you will be welcoming to your institutions in the fall may be rather out of practice at first. Make your classes impossible to tune out. Help them have fun learning as they reacclimate to academic rigor—even as you hold them to high standards.
Part of enabling students’ success means demonstratively believing in them enough to alter your curriculum. On the first day of a college-accredited elective I teach, a senior got stuck on a creative writing prompt as her classmates typed with fervor. Naturally, I reframed the task with examples, but I wasn’t getting through. Finally, I told her, “Just be creative. Let the ideas flow.”
“But I am not very creative,” she said.
I was astounded. “Then why are you taking creative writing?”
“I want to learn to be creative.”
Now, I was sold. This senior was deep in the dream of learning and owning it. Someone had told her creativity and careers were linked, so she signed up for my class. I spent the rest of the semester embedding vocational themes into the course so students could collaborate like work colleagues. One day, our learning space transformed into a TV series writers’ room. On restaurant day, we asked, “How, as creative writers, might we jazz up the lunch menu and make chicken tenders sound like gourmet cuisine?” Helping my students write the great American novel was no longer enough; I wanted them to experience a collective imagination so no matter what paths they take, creativity might brighten their careers—and maybe their lunch boxes.
Show students how the lessons in their courses matter for real life (and don’t be afraid to get creative yourself). Once, some eleventh graders challenged my vocabulary lists built from academic texts, claiming the words were fake news. Attrition, dearth, myriad, pugnacious, and stalwart sounded more like Harry Potter incantations to them. I was aghast. How could I make students appreciate that our language was rich with nuance—and would be useful in deciphering a lifetime of reading? Words were my religion; how could I make them believers?
I bribed them.
I had three sections of eleventh graders. The class that brought me the most examples of advanced vocabulary found in magazines, novels, textbooks, and newspapers would get a pizza party. My students began to believe me about the power of language when they spotted half of our vocabulary words in sports articles. One day, a student stopped me outside my classroom, breathlessly announcing she had just found egregious in her economics text. In their free time, my students scoured the Sunday paper, library magazines, and, yes, the internet, and they often brought me words they thought I should add. They recruited their parents for help, and suddenly Mr. Weaver’s vocabulary became part of family conversations. If I had just proceeded with quizzes in a “my way or the highway” approach, my students might have remembered definitions in the short term, but my pizza bribe gave them the words for life, or so I hope.
I am fifty-five years young, and this is my twenty-eighth year of teaching. On good days, I know it is my life’s calling. I think of all the teachers in high school and college who pushed me, got to know me, and made sure I gave it my all. There are many teachers I don’t remember because their inflexible curriculum was more important to them than teaching students to utilize it. Some of the things that work in education are incredibly straightforward. Get to know students as individuals, not names on a roster. That’s simple. Banning distractions like cell phones in your classrooms is simple, too. Block Gemini and other AI. Return to on-demand class writing to make sure students’ findings are original. Let students present their ideas aloud and proud and in person.
The kids are alright. Make them believers in face-to-face learning. Make the semester a rich one. Make them want to be in your class not because it’s required but because they are excited about your amazingly unique approach to the material. Challenge them to visit you after the semester ends to share all the things they are learning in their other classes. If they see your investment in them, they will feel rewarded and be better prepared to solve the next generation’s social and technical problems, like AI memory implants and language downloads.
Photo courtesy of Liberal Education (Adobe, iStock)
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