Keeping the main blog clean.

Sometimes, what you need to do is literally ask for a refill. I know that can be scary and upsetting and requires you to be willing to be vulnerable, but please consider two things:

One: if what you want to do is be able to fill other people's cups, you can't fill from an empty cup. You literally can't do the work if you're emptied out. You need to do this so you can help.

Two: for the people that love you, the people that really matter, you aren't imposing on them by asking for a refill. This is one of the things I really internalized from coming home to Judaism: when someone asks me to help them, they're giving me the opportunity to perform a mitzvah. No matter your belief system or outlook, I think we can probably all agree that being given an opportunity to be more awesome is pretty great.

So ask. Here are a few scripts you can try.

"Hey, I am...

... having a bad day.

... really struggling.

... really hurting because of the state of the world.

... having a hard time focusing on positive things.

... feeling emptied out.

Could you please help me? I could really use...

... some company.

... to hear about something beautiful you saw today.

... to hear some good news.

... to see a picture of your pet.

... to be told something you like about me.

... to be reminded of something I do that you like.

... your silliest new meme.

... to go for a walk with you.

... to hear about your favorite show.

... a hug."

I have genuinely never asked my friends to love me a little bit louder and gotten anything but an outpouring of support.

I need to remind people they too can ask me for a refill.

If the pay isn't worth it, if the hourly rate is pathetic and I have to work an entire day to afford the gas/bus fare to get to work that week and buying lunch for one day = 2 or 3 hours of work, in my mind, it's just better to walk out. If the price of getting to work and existing at work costs that much, I'd rather sit at home and read or something.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

here we shake the heavy woolen coat of woman off of our shoulders, and here we see what we are left with: there still remains the sexual violence and exploitation, there still remains our tamped down dreams and constricted voices, there still remains the disadvantage in forward momentum, there still remains the need for everything feminism has to offer. these are not innate to the internal landscape of womanhood, and we prove that. some have found this on their own, but many more yet are still entirely unaware there is even a distinction to be made.

i believe for some women, our insistence on still maintaining that connection to our history of survival under patriarchy, to our pasts and the marks they have left, is seen in some way as us choosing to permanently tie ourselves to womanhood. a baffling choice to - what is it they love to chuck our way? - “misgender ourselves”. in reality what is occurring is that we are experiencing the split between what it means to not be a woman, and yet live your life under patriarchy’s boot no less than before self actualization.

what they are really telling us is: not only is women’s suffering innate to the experience of being a woman, and only a woman, but that what we have survived, what we have lived through, inherently delegitimizes our transsexual male identities.

because the thought that they have cultivated an understanding of womanhood on a half truth is so intolerable, and the thought of allowing the sense of self to rearrange with newly acquired information is so unacceptable, the rules are created thusly: to be acknowledged as men we are required to tuck away every patriarchy inflicted wound, deal with them quietly and privately so as not to bother or god forbid burden any woman with them, keep quiet every hit that is inflicted upon us in the present moment, take it on the chin, and stoically lift up the women around us with our metaphorical, or perhaps at times literal, bruised bodies.

Like yeah, the ground is covered with wavy leaf basketgrass and creeping Charlie, but there's huge stretches of low ground dominated by skunk cabbage. There's patches of garlic mustard, but also Jack-in-the-pulpit. House sparrows and Carolina wrens. Asian lady beetles and yellowjackets. Multiflora rose and poison ivy. Bamboo and tuliptree.

Interchanges of species have always occurred on this planet, long before humans became global travelers. And when they happen, the new species -- whether plant or animal -- either gets destroyed and leaves no surviving descendant populations, or it gains a foothold and establishes itself.

And in the case of the latter, that new species usually has success because the checks and balances of its original ecosystem don't exist in the new one. The parasites that weigh it down, the fungi that infest it, the animals that eat it, none of them exist in this new world. The new species becomes successful, gets ignored as a food source, reproduces unchecked, and pushes out its would-be competition...

And then, eventually, equilibrium happens.

Parasites figure out a way around its defenses. Predators or herbivores start to exploit it as a food source. The surviving species around it harden themselves against its behavior.

It takes hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years, but eventually the ecosystem will adapt to this newcomer and it will find its balance.

The more I've learned about invasive species and ecosystems, the more I find myself confronted with the realization that it will all be okay in the end. This has happened before and it will happen again.

Yeah. Absolutely. That does happen. That's why we have jaguars in South America and not terror birds.

I'm not saying this to suggest that we should just blithely accept the damage that invasive species do to their new ecosystems. I'm not saying we should stop trying to stop them. Quite the opposite, because efforts to curtail the spread and dominance of invasive species does buy native ones valuable time to adapt to their presence.

but “ai is just bad because it’s bad” will convince no one and is a morally lazy position to take. about anything!

"Well if it was important why didn't anyone say it sooner?" "if it was important, why didn't they say it was racist?" peer, a good 75-80% of what I might say to the white and/or nonblack people that offend me directly goes swallowed for the sake of my paychecks and running water, or God forbid to avoid a bullet. Or if I'm online (where that number shrinks significantly), to be left the fuck alone 🤣

even if you don't answer this, thanks for being a kind, reasonable voice fighting for trans men/mascs and enben!

yeah! i totally can, but just, right off the bat i am not a sociologist right like, i easily could get something wrong here and i encourage anyone who has education on this topic to pipe in if i’ve misspoken or left things out. all i have is my own brain and observations.

for me, i do not believe that socialization is something that is happening solely inside of us. it is the experiences we go through and what is done to us. each individual person regardless of their gender and sex, is going to respond to the socialization they receive uniquely. not only that but in the case of some intersex people and trans people who transition early, multiple different gendered socializations can occur throughout development. and even then, socialization never ends as long as we are alive, so things get even more complicated from there for trans people. furthermore the axes of identity will complicate matters exponentially as the gendered socializations that gender nonconforming cis gay men and cis lesbian women experience are unique to their heterosexual counterparts, as well as race also complicating things even further. it is not cut and dry whatsoever, but even though it is not simple or exact, i do wholeheartedly believe it to be real.

i have not ever experienced anything but female socialization, i am keenly aware of it. it’s in the way i speak, move, act, it is in how i connect to people, how i doubt myself, and how i have edited myself down to be palatable (undoing this as we speak!). i feel it most strongly when i am around cis men, it is this invisible barrier between me and them, this thing that i feel inside of me setting me apart as other. if i didn’t believe social gender was a bogus human construct built from patriarchal culture that we all must dismantle in ourselves i probably would feel stronger dysphoria about it than i do, but i do love myself, and the strange combination i am, both in my own internal makeup and how i have responded to my environment.

i often hear trans women speak about how they did not experience male socialization pre transition, where they then go on to list things out like being punished for their femininity, being excluded from cis male environments for not being man enough, receiving physical brutality because of their failure at patriarchal manhood. being sexually violated by male on male domination behavior. and it hurts my brain a little bit, because none of that happens in female socialization. that is exactly how those who are viewed as male are treated.

female socialization can include being taught from a very young age that your body is not your own, that sex is all you are good for, that you are more of an object than a person. experiencing it can look like not being able to speak up and advocate for yourself, not knowing how to say no, being deprived of education in finance, automotive care, wilderness survival skills, sports, tech and even some instruments. being expected to suffer through unimaginable pain while simultaneously being told you aren’t experiencing it. it can look like compulsively wearing makeup because you don’t recognize yourself without it. it can look like always doubting yourself while having to work ten times harder than those perceived as male. it results in career setbacks and self sabotage while far less qualified people perceived as male waltz into new positions like they were made for them. held tongues, held breath, bowed heads, making yourself smaller and smaller until you’re nothing but what the people around you want to see. it looks like cleaning the kitchen for hours after an event while those perceived as men sit around and rest. for people perceived as women, especially if they are black, it can look like any assertion of will or boundary being treated as hysterical aggression, which results in finely tuned and closely monitored emotions and repression. it can feel like being more of a mask than a person, as if you are empty halls waiting to be filled by the people who get to decide what you are and who you should be. female socialization creates severe shame around desire, where your own body’s pleasure is not even an afterthought, but completely irrelevant altogether. being sexualized and objectified from such an early point in life that it can be extraordinarily difficult to recognize when sexual assault has been committed against you. it can result in not knowing who you are outside of your roles to others (mother, sister, wife, sex object). getting stuck in customer service voice in your own home, and deep shame at letting yourself get loud. hair forced to stay long, voice forced to stay soft, high and quiet. body forced to be small, and the plethora of eating disorders that can come from that. any perceived masculinity is often shamed out of you, where you go from being having the personhood of a household pet to an unwanted object lacking in any use whatsoever that must be corrected and reminded of it’s duty as a sex object. being required to be more emotionally intelligent and treated as though the emotional deficits of those with male socialization are yours to make up for. a permanent place of rehabilitation for others and their growth. a heavy burden of responsibility for the well being of your family, and becoming a mother figure to your own father and/or siblings. socialization that results in thinking of everyone else before yourself, not taking into account your own needs. and more, god so much more.

male socialization on the other hand, though i only know what i do from external observation and listening to those who experienced it, can look like being told from a young age that you are inherently dangerous and violent. that your fundamental use is as a protector and provider and asking for help yourself reduces you to a failure of a man. it can include hazing rituals that require committing violence, or having violence committed towards you. it can look like having your anger cultivated, and anything soft about you brutalized and punished. it is a thunder dome where any second, in the wrong company, you can be humiliated and have your manhood stripped from you. it looks like being taught the way to be a person is to strip the personhood from others. for black, indigenous, mena and latinx people viewed as men this can amplify into being treated as a national threat, inherently violent, often sexually violent, angry, and animalistic, solely because of how they are physically perceived. this is used to stock prisons with slave labor as if these human beings were chattel. often any bit of femininity is stripped from you, self expression in clothing and body art is limited, and indulgence in them is often a shameful secret. it also looks like often being prioritized in education, given more room to explore creatively and intellectually, and more readily praised for attempts. there is often heavy emphasis on being physical strong and looking capable of domination and so many eating disorders go unchecked because of this. it can look like coddling, protection when said person has caused harm, and lack of accountability being required. a stern duty given to you where you become the man of the house, for your mother and/or siblings. not being taught to take responsibility for your own emotions and wellbeing. being stripped of personhood and made into a proper male soldier. “weakness” is turned to pulp and patriarchal “strength” is given every accolade. male socialization can be incredibly isolating, lonely and cold. and it can warp you if you let it.

this is not even the half of it, but hopefully something in here can be useful for someone to chew on. none of it is simple, and none of what i have said should be taken as hard and fast rules. but these are real social phenomenons we experience, and the thought that none of them shape us whatsoever when we are trans is absolutely ridiculous. and i believe the desire to separate from it comes from a place of dysphoria, running from accountability, some more dysphoria, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what socialization actually is.

i once saw a trans woman say that she would rather confront her experience with male socialization than not, because look at the alternative. it crosses my mind often.

no socialization is forever if you do not want it to be, we can make ourselves and remake ourselves over and over again, we can cross gendered lines and experience a thousand and one different ways of being that are not confined to a binary.

i do not believe that socialization theory is a damning one, i think it is deeply hopeful. as someone who has spent the better part of a decade going hard at the unhealthy things that got picked up from female socialization, burning them up inside of me, i know it is not a permanent sentence that you’ll forever be bound to. but you just might be if you never allow yourself to look at it and confront it head on.

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

You dont *have* to be feminine. But you're allowed to be.

You dont *have* to be androgynous. But you're allowed to be.

Your identity is not cookie cutter. You don't have to force yourself into any category, you don't have to adjust your choices to appeal to others.