Does anyone else feel like our job has basically devolved into theater?

Does anyone else feel like our job has basically devolved into theater?

I teach high school English. My day consists of presenting literature to increasingly apathetic and depressed teenagers. In some classes, a little over half of the students pay zero attention. Some put their heads down the moment they walk in. Cell phones, though banned, are a constant battle. Headphones? That fight has been completely lost. Absences are through the roof, both for legitimate reasons—illness—and illegitimate ones, such as kids not wanting to get out of bed for their 1st block class.

When I do manage to get someone's attention, I am still competing with something else—be it their Chromebook, their headphones, their Apple Watch, or the phone in their pocket. No one is paying complete attention to the teacher anymore.

As for work, half my students won’t do anything beyond the most basic assignments. If I assign a project or an essay, I scaffold it, provide resources, examples, and in-class time (often a week or more). The majority of students mess around, accomplish very little, and then turn in nothing. Even worse, many are perfectly fine failing the class because they aren’t willing to write a four-paragraph essay—the same type of essay they’ll have to write in one sitting for the standardized test for this class.

When I fail these students, admin comes to me, asking why so many failed and what I need to do to fix it. They tell me to call parents—which I do. Most don’t answer. Most calls go straight to voicemail. And when I push back and say I’ve never worked with students this apathetic in my entire career, admin shifts the blame back to me. But my coworkers are all experiencing the same thing.

The unspoken expectation is to cook the books, to inflate grades. And the thing is, they’re already inflated. I give plenty of completion grades—small, easy assignments meant largely to pad the grade book—but even those only get about 50–75% participation.

We’re kidding ourselves, right? None of this has any meaning anymore. We’re just putting on a performance—pretending we’re educating these kids, pretending our society isn’t in alarming decline. And honestly, I think a lot of teachers hesitate to say this out loud because the immediate response is to blame us. People will say it’s our fault that students aren’t engaged, that our classes aren’t run well enough. But I don’t think the blame lies with us. My entire school is dealing with this problem. I have coworkers—some of whom have won Teacher of the Year—who are struggling just as much. And at a certain point, what more can I do as a teacher if a student’s first action upon entering my class is to lay their head down on the table and refuse to speak to me?

Maybe some of you have had different experiences depending on your school and location, but I’ve seen this play out over the last four years, both in a wealthy suburban school and in an inner-city one. Anyone else experiencing this? Am I completely wrong?