The Student Mind

I am teaching two courses this semester that have no business being as good as they are, The Rhetorics of Death and Writing to Heal.

In the first, I asked students to write about the first time they understood that something or someone wouldn’t last forever. In the second, I asked them to write about something they’ve never been able to say out loud. Both assignments are, in their way, impossible. You can’t write well about death at nineteen, or twenty—not even when you’re fifty or sixty and death is just around the corner, always present. You can’t write well about the unspeakable at any age. And yet—and I keep returning to this, turning it over, not quite believing it—they do.

A student writes about standing on a street in Copenhagen, having just learned by phone that he has twin brothers he didn’t know existed. Weeks later, a close friend dies by suicide. He writes about both, and what holds the essay together is not the drama of either event but a quiet question he can barely bring himself to ask: what am I for?

Another student traces a pattern she’s been living inside her whole life—building something impressive every time something falls apart, blanket to TikTok account to valedictorian to pre-med—and then, mid-essay, turns the lens on the essay itself: Is this an awakening, or just a more sophisticated version of the thing I’m trying to escape?

I want to be honest about something. Every semester I walk into these classrooms not entirely sure it will work—what will work. Not the syllabus—I know the syllabus. Not the readings—Becker, Hesse, Kafka, Megan Daum, they’ve earned their place. What I’m not sure about is whether the students will go there. Whether they’ll move past the safe version of the assignment—the one that checks the boxes, cites the sources, wraps up neatly—and into the version that actually costs them something. The version where you discover, mid-sentence, that the essay you thought you were writing is about something else entirely. The version where you have to stop typing and sit with what just came out of you.

They go there. Not all of them, and not on the same day, but enough of them, often enough, that I’ve stopped treating it as a surprise and started treating it as evidence.

Evidence of what? That’s where I want to push back against a story I keep hearing—from colleagues, from op-eds, from the discourse around AI and education and the so-called crisis of the humanities. The story goes like this: students today can’t focus, can’t write, can’t think. They’re addicted to their phones. They use AI to cheat. They want trigger warnings and grade inflation and the path of least resistance. They are, depending on who’s telling the story, fragile or lazy or both.

I don’t recognize the 40-plus students in my courses in that story. I recognize something else: a culture that has made it extraordinarily difficult to do the kind of slow, uncomfortable, honest work these students are doing—and then blames the students for not doing it.

We are in a moment where the federal government is prosecuting a war it barely explains, where AI is being deployed for surveillance and targeting while universities debate whether students should be allowed to use Grammarly, where the attention economy has converted every waking hour into an opportunity for content consumption, and where the future—economic, ecological, civic—carries a weight of uncertainty that I did not feel at their age and that I’m not sure I could have borne. This is the water my students swim in. And what I’m telling you is that inside that water, in a classroom in Vermont, they are writing essays about a metronome on a grandmother’s piano, about a bed frame carried upstairs, about a mirror driven into a skull, about listening for a mother’s breathing at three in the morning—and they are doing it with a precision and honesty that would be remarkable in any era, let alone this one.

The secret, if there is one, is trust. Not blind trust. Structured trust. I build a process—freewrites, small groups, graduated drafts, peer editing, AI feedback used as diagnosis rather than production—and then I trust the students to do the thing the process makes possible. I don’t tell them what their essay is about. I create conditions —pressure and safety in equal measure—and then I wait. Sometimes the waiting is the hardest part. A student circles the same safe topic for three drafts before something cracks open. Another freezes after missing the workshop because she didn’t get to hear her peers’ stories. A third writes a thousand words about a grandfather’s death and discovers he has nothing to say—and that absence of feeling becomes the real essay, the one about memory loss and compulsive achievement and a self built on sand.

None of this shows up on a dashboard. None of it appears in a learning outcome or an assessment metric. The student who discovers, at twenty, that her composure was a defense mechanism she inherited from her mother —that realization can’t be graded. The student who recognizes that his community taught him the fear of uselessness long before death taught him the fear of dying —that insight doesn’t have a rubric line. But these are the moments when education is actually happening. Not the transmission of content. The slow, sometimes painful, always uncertain process of a person becoming visible to themselves.

I trust that my students can do this work because I have watched them do it, semester after semester, in conditions that should make it impossible. The world outside the classroom is loud, fractured, accelerating, and increasingly hostile to the kind of interiority that writing demands. And still they write. They write about the things that frighten them. They share those things with peers they barely know. They revise, which means they go back into the difficult thing and stay longer. They submit work that makes them feel exposed, and then they come to class the next day and sit in the circle and do it again.

I don’t know what the future holds for them. I don’t know what the war will cost, or what AI will rearrange, or what institutions will survive the decade. But I know this: the capacity to look honestly at your own life, to name what you’ve been avoiding, to sit with discomfort instead of resolving it—that capacity is not dead. It is not even diminished. It is alive in my classroom, and it is the single most important thing I have ever been trusted to teach.

The students are writing. That should tell us something.

This essay was originally published under the titled “The Students are Writing” at Hector Vila’s Substack the Uncanny.