Copyright Hartford Courant
I write in deep sympathy with Dennis Barone, whose column “Five reasons why I am glad to be retired” (Nov. 11, 2025) resonated with me very powerfully. I retired in 2022 after teaching English at Central Connecticut State University for just short of 30 years, and at all institutions just short of 40 years. I taught through the pandemic, when we were all tossed into a raging sea and had to struggle to survive minute by minute. Temporary rafts were swamped, lifeboats were scuttled, and even the rescuers presented their own difficulties with evolving and often dysfunctional software and hardware, all while each of us, professor and student alike, was struggling with trauma beyond simply being lost at sea. I write, however, to suggest that simply trying to turn back the clock—that is, just accepting Dr. Barrone’s prescription to read the greats, and much though, again, I agree profoundly with the advice—will not resonate with those to whom the advice is given. I believe that a great part of the problem is that in this country we have lost any clear understanding of the process of learning. “No child left behind” has left generations of students believing the goal is the grade. Dozens of students have came to my office hours at the beginning of the semester to tell me with genuine enthusiasm that they were aiming for an “A” in my class. I usually grabbed a sticky note, wrote a big “A” on it, handed it to them and told them to go to the bursar quickly to get as much of their money back as they could. The transcript is not the education. Grades are information on the process of mastery, not the mastery itself. I’ve also had students who were caught using the older version of AI (that is, a quick search engine plagiarism) losing patience with my objections to this cheating by asking what could possibly be the point of their thinking about things since all this other ‘thought’ is right there to be had. Just as the grade is not the point, neither is the turning in of paper the point. Not all athletes are weight-lifters, but most athletes lift weights or undergo other physical conditioning to become strong enough to do what their sport requires. Coursework is not the product, but the mental conditioning to get you to your own desired goal. So I believe the remedy is to lay out for these tech-native students the actual mechanisms of learning. When I spoke to incoming students at orientation sessions, I would ask them to think about the salary they expected to command upon graduation. Then I asked them to project 10 years after their graduation to their own successful company that was now ready to hire new employees. When I asked if they would give that desirable salary to a newly-minted college grad whose only skill was to plagiarize from public search engines, they all unanimously agreed that they would not. The same would be true of AI-dependence—why pay someone to do what you can do yourself for free? I then asked the new first-year students to imagine finally getting their dream job, only to have their supervisor appear early at their desk one morning to ask if they’d seen the ‘big news’ that was going to have a huge effect on their business. Their boss then asks them to go out and discover everything they can about this new development, being careful both to evaluate and document their sources; to summarize the material they’ve gathered; to prepare a video presentation for the executives in the company including bullet-points of the challenges, and to propose possible responses to the challenge the company faced; and to be prepared to present this information at a meeting in three days. When I would ask for hands from the people who felt they could do all that as they were about to start their college education, I never got even one. The good news I could then share is that if they actually throw themselves into their coursework—mastering the array of human thought processes a university asks them to encounter through regular practice guided by their faculty coaches—they will learn how to learn and have an actual education will allow them to rise to such challenges. If we demystify the actual work of learning, I believe every new generation will be able to follow in the footsteps of the greats, becoming great themselves. Dr. Mary Anne Nunn, professor emerita, English Department, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain
