Donuts? Seriously?

In which I attempt to increase reader engagement by responding directly to one of my subscribers.

You might recall that in last week’s entry I started to ruminate on an alarming trend in today’s post-apocalyptic world: the disrespectful classroom behavior that has spawned exponentially (like the zombie virus itself) ever since the undead began lurking just outside the iron gates of our elite boarding school. This week I would like to further the discussion, with an eye toward finding solutions to this vexing problem.

I should start by saying that disrespect in the classroom was never an issue for me before the zombies came. Students would always enter my class offering a cheerful “good morning” and exit with a polite “thank you,” even (ironically) when I had just given them a grueling in-class essay, after which they had virtually no reason to give thanks. In-between those good mornings and thank-yous, students never failed to sit up straight, activate their listening ears and thinking heads, raise their hands before speaking, and in all other ways conduct themselves with a dignity and grace that made them well-deserving of wearing the Riverview Academy insignia on their sweatshirts. Or other various and sundry items of swag.

But lately, things have taken a noticeable turn for the worse.

You must believe me when I say that I have never been opposed to spirited debate or healthy disagreement in the classroom, and I would never want students to shut down discourse due to a misguided belief that my opinions are sacrosanct and beyond dispute. But there’s a big difference between students displaying a healthy skepticism and an occasional interest in thinking for themselves, as opposed to an ardent desire to contradict virtually everything that comes out of my mouth.

Plus, since the dawning of the apocalypse, there’s been a noticeable shift in the students’ tone of voice and attitude, which can be downright sassy at times.

Plus, there’s been an uptick in brash informality—since when is it appropriate to address an adult authority figure as “Mr. Teacher Dude”?

Even the mousey kids have started getting a little too big for their proverbial britches.

One can only speculate as to the reasons why behavior during seminar discussions has started to deteriorate.

Perhaps there was always something a little transactional about all that polite respectfulness pre-apocalypse. Maybe students were simply striving for a strong participation grade, an outstanding college recommendation letter. These days, with all the nihilism and meaningless of existence and whatnot now that the end is most certainly nigh, perhaps participation grades aren’t the carrot they used to be? And perhaps an Ivy League acceptance is no longer much of an incentive, since we cannot know with any certainty that Harvard will even exist a few years from now?

One might also argue that students who attend elite preparatory schools like Riverview Academy have always looked to those in positions of power as role models dictating the rules of acceptable behavior. In that case could one logically conclude, now that the zombies are dominating our world, that our students are looking to them for behavioral guidance? Is that why they currently seem to prefer grunting and moaning as modes of discourse as they sit around the Harkness table?

Or is it possible that our constant state of war has impacted our psychological mindset so much that it has had a profound effect on all of our cultural institutions, and even our everyday social interactions? In other words, do students feel an overpowering compulsion to make each class conversation a violent battleground, even when the topic of said conversation is Thoreau’s commentary on the serenity of nature?

Whatever the cause, it seems that no matter how much I have been trying to connect to students’ lives through the power of literature, they seem intent on pushing me away through the power of snark.

One might think that this is the root of all my frustrations as of late, but in fact I have become deeply troubled by something else:

As it turns out, I still have just five followers on Substack, and I’m convinced that three of them are a distant relative operating incognito. Even more disturbing, only one reader responded to last week’s survey—a man who cryptically refers to himself as “John from Wyoming.”

Perhaps he is still alive and active on Substack because Wyoming is the least densely populated state, so the virus hasn’t spread very rapidly there. More likely, the zombies have simply left “John from Wyoming” alone, because (to put it as tactfully as I can) his brain seems to lack nutritive value.

John’s “brilliant ideas” (his words, not mine) for improving classroom management during the zombie apocalypse are as follows: 1) use assigned seating; and 2) encourage proper behavior by plying students with donuts.

As a teacher well-versed in the canon of world literature, I can say with confidence that these absurd suggestions are the textbook definition of “Kafkaesque.”

For starters, anyone who follows educational research knows that assigned seating is a regressive pedagogy, associated with authoritarian classrooms and “carceral models” of education. I personally stopped using assigned seats decades ago after attending a remarkable professional development workshop on “Spatial Autonomy and the Ethics of the Harkness Table.” I realize, of course, that the ongoing apocalypse has forced teachers to be flexible with their pedagogical methods, but that doesn’t mean I am willing to toss my entire progressive teaching philosophy in the proverbial garbage like it’s some sort of stale baked good.

And speaking of stale baked goods: Donuts? Seriously?

Perhaps things are different in the mountain west, Mr. “John from Wyoming” Dude, where most adolescents spend their Friday nights engaged in cow-tipping or other acts of barbarism. But at Riverview Academy, I teach the children of diplomats, hedge-fund managers, B-list celebrities. They spread caviar on their bagels. Do you really suppose they could be motivated by donuts?

Plus, not even the recent apocalypse will convince me to regard extrinsic motivation as an effective pedagogical tool. I absolutely refuse to reduce the study of literature to nothing more than a sugar-based transaction.

Just to test out John’s absurd hypothesis, I visited the abandoned Trader Joe’s near campus, where I have been doing most of my scavenging, to check out their donut situation. Not surprisingly, the donut aisle had already been completely ransacked, and all of the good flavors were taken. All that was left was a single package of plain crullers—not an easy sell for adolescents even before the zombies arrived. The package had already been opened, and only seven crullers remained. Two were structurally compromised. The expiration date was several months ago.

I brought said crullers to my AP English class yesterday, along with a carefully designed rubric assigning point values to various classroom behaviors I was trying to encourage. The plan was that bite-sized slices of donut would be doled out at the end of the period in proportion to the number of points each student earned. You know, positive reinforcement and such.

Alas, when I entered my classroom with the crullers, my students swarmed around me, moaning, arms outstretched, with a fervor rivaled only by the zombies themselves. By the time I made it through the doorway, not a single crumb remained and two buttons were missing from the sleeve of my Oxford.

So I never got to use the rubric. And the resulting sugar high made classroom behavior even more unacceptable than it was in the days leading up to this horror show.

It goes without saying that I am once again tumbling into a deep canyon of despair and existential dread. Not just because of the whole zombie apocalypse and the collapse of law and order and the social contract and whatnot, and not even because of the recent uptick in classroom management issues or my embarrassing lack of subscribers. On top of all that, I now worry that social media will never be the panacea I was hoping it would be. Because what sort of emotional validation am I really getting when the one reader who bothered to fill out my survey last week is so bereft of intellectual ability that he will probably never be able to comprehend my pain.