My father graduated from Columbia College in 1951. When he would reflect on his time in Morningside Heights, every story had a few elements in common. They’d feature his rowdy roommates, fond memories of late-night study sessions, and a reminder of how hard he had to work to get to—and stay at—Columbia. Most importantly, every tale included a supposedly unsolvable mathematical equation sketched out on a massive chalkboard and presented sardonically to college students—one of which always had the gumption and generational brilliance to solve it.
I am ashamed to say that such times are behind us. Modern teens have no interest in approaching a fat chalkboard with a furrowed brow and achieving the mathematically impossible. This generation’s attention spans have been compromised by their constant consumption of TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn Reels. They don’t have the patience or determination to systematically dismantle a theorem that’s eluded the grasp of physicists for centuries. They’d rather be using filters that give them dog ears or posting about the Big Chungus.
Students simply aren’t prepared for the big chalkboards anymore. I was stunned to find out that many of the students in my class were never asked to work through an unreasonably complex equation after they stumbled into an empty room with a big ol’ blackboard. This puts an incredible strain on educators like myself, who now have to hold the hands of their students through introductory-level chalkboard thinking. I have had to write “Unsolvable,” “Impossible,” or “I bet nobody can solve this!” on many of my traps because students don’t even consider taking the initiative to approach a chalkboard.
What does this fundamental failure mean for the next generation of American leadership? How will our successors address the many threats faced by our great country when they don’t even have the courage to broach a chalky sketch of puzzling calculations? University culture is in crisis, and we urgently need a ground-up restructuring of our education system so that students are prepared to engage with the convoluted chalkboard challenges of the future.
