All We Read Is Freaks

There is a sad spentness even to the young ones, as if the future has been hollowed out by how many impulses they’ve already gratified... They’ve been destimulated.

My students are shocked to be expected to read or produce more than a sound bite. Hundreds of them have claimed to be unable to generate three pages on any subject, yet you could not convince them that there are deficiencies in their world of surfaces. They rely on pictographs, like cavemen, and the conversations I overhear in the hallway are ceremonies of largely nonverbal calls and responses: “S’Weekend?” “Uhhn.” “Guh?” “Hrrn.” “Tch.”
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I receive papers extolling our “cute-throat, doggie-dog world” or how protective one must be of one’s “self of steam.” My moonlighting high-school students embrace the challenges presented by “duel-enrollment.” I have had students write papers decrying “unusual new ideas”; a student even called my ban on clichés persecutory, insisting that they were his main mode of communication, without which he would be able to say nothing. - All We Read Is Freaks