This fall, when Suzanna Kruger walked into her biology classroom, she noticed something strange: Two dozen students were staring back at her.
“They were willing to make eye contact,” Kruger, a 55-year-old high school teacher in Seaside, Oregon, told me. “They even said hello.”
It was something she hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. “If a kid had their phone in class, I could just simply walk up to them, and they would hand it over,” Kruger said. But by the fall of 2021, when students returned from a year of distance learning, she said she had started feeling like the teacher from Charlie Brown.
“They looked at me like I was just going ‘wah, wah, wah,’ ” Kruger said, adding that most kids in her class were either asleep with their heads on their desks, wearing headphones, or doing a “dead-eyed scroll” through TikTok. And when she asked them to turn over their device, she said most students just “refused.”
“I’m 55, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do another 10 years of this.’ ”