Love-Driven Effort: Student Agency in the Digital Age

by Matt Bardin, Zinc Learning Labs Founder and CEO

No matter how cynical we teachers become, there is no deeper satisfaction than our students' growth.

In my work developing reading software for teens, I interact with secondary schools across America. Paradoxically, given how far behind the students are, the teacher always seems by far the hardest working person in every classroom. Between the pandemic and screen-induced brainrot, the effort to engage students has gotten much harder. Amazingly, I see teachers continuing to bring massive effort. Our ever-illusive reward? To see that light turn on in their eyes.

Teachers have always fought an uphill battle. Tasked with responsibility for others’ growth, we have limited authority over our students’ actions. We are coaches who don’t pick our players. To succeed, we need them to want to play, but the dubious traditional carrot and stick motivators—mainly grades—that our teachers used with us feel increasingly ineffectual in our new era. The pandemic left many students even more behind and hopeless about carrots, even as refinements in social media train their minds on a steady diet of the most passive pleasures.

The basic units of motivation have always been external and fear-driven. Work hard in school, we’ve told students, or you’ll get a bad grade, disappoint your family, look foolish in front of peers, or fail to get into college or secure a good job. We have been trying to train people like we train dogs. We love our pets, but our students’ lives demand cognitive skills that go way beyond obedience and rote moves.

Valid though these threats may be, they never worked well for a large majority. Decades of disappointing student results on standardized tests confirm what all successful educators know intuitively: if you push someone who’s stumbling, they fall down.

The wisdom of the internet explains these failures. With impressive determination and efficiency, big tech has discovered, cultivated and exploited neurological short cuts to our innate human laziness. None of the outside consequences mentioned above rewards the pleasure centers in our brains the way an endless stream of cute, surprising videos or exploding alien spaceships does. Almost all teens still want to please parents and teachers. Most still care about grades. But these fear-driven, extrinsic inducements cannot compete with the blunt force of intrinsic, algorithmic swipes and scrolls.

This is a huge opportunity for educators.

Should we reinvent learning to compete with screens as a garden of digital delights? We certainly must learn from the behavioral axioms the internet reveals, but, as Duolingo co-founder Luis von Ahn points out, learning, which is inherently hard, can never drive attention the way experiences engineered to be as easy as possible can. To succeed, our students need to exert themselves.

The victories of their screens over our students’ minds both demand a new approach from educators and create the conditions for something truly new and better.

Life online demolishes agency, our attentions and sense of self seamlessly extracted from us by the limitless novelty of the internet. No one feels the distraction, anxiety, and loss of self wrought by our screens more keenly than our post-pandemic young people.

But how can school compete, much less help?

As fun and compelling as dance clips, NFL mock drafts, or doomscrolling are, no one feels refreshed and invigorated by an afternoon on Reddit or TikTok. Hours of scrolling will never compete with the satisfaction of reading a great novel or mastering a difficult skill. Von Ahn points out one advantage his app has over apps that merely distract and entertain: “When you’re learning something,” he says, “You get meaning out of it.”

The same can be said about making real effort of any kind. I still can’t tell my students how learning [substitute any topic a student finds difficult, from Shakespeare to cellular respiration] will serve them in their future, but the massive abyss of pre-digested internet “content” gnawing at their souls makes the exertion needed to learn anything redemptive. Joan Didion characterized such efforts as “small disciplines” and identified them as the key to the quality most desperately sought by so many adolescents: self-respect. When we work hard at something just for practice, we learn to trust ourselves and our powers. Doing so for a grade never delivers the same value.

Yes, we’re all lazy. No, we can’t all be saints or geniuses. But we also all—every one of us—love to work hard. There is no meaning or satisfaction in life without effort. That contradictory idea—that we’re all lazy, living for the weekend AND that we all love and need serious effort—must replace the carrot/stick model that never worked, bred discord and dysfunction, and is currently being dealt the coup de grace by digital tech.

Our classrooms can become a refuge of agency from the ocean of online distraction, not by telling our students to work hard or scaring them about their futures, but by getting them to experience and appreciate meaningful effort. Giving them choices helps. So does understanding their needs and providing tools that challenge each student at an appropriate ability level. But truly getting them in the game depends on their desire to play.

Thousands of hours of swiping and scrolling condition the mind to want to be done. As one teacher in Florida put it, “I don’t know where they’re in such a rush to get to!” Whenever my students work hard at something, I ask them what felt good about it. Some will say, “Nothing.” They act as if I’m trying to trick them into some kind of sacrifice. I’m not. I’m trying to give them the biggest gift they’ll ever get: the power of themselves. That’s usually good enough for most of them.

I’m not suggesting you change your approach to teaching because the old ways are failing, which they are, or to improve your students' test scores, which this will. Tech can support you with tools, but only teachers can transform learning. You should interest your students in love-driven effort because YOUR love for THEIR growth is your superpower.

You can follow Matt on Substack: https://substack.com/@mattbardin2.