How to Fight Loneliness - Macleans.ca

Last fall, just days before reading week, I found myself trying to hold the attention of 100 burned-out, overworked undergrads in a class at Toronto Metropolitan University. By that point in the semester, most students are more interested in a few days off than in listening to someone like me, a 31-year-old grad student and academic support coach delivering a workshop on study habits. I’d delivered these workshops before and always found it challenging to elicit engagement—the anonymity of being one face in a crowd makes it easy for students to fade into the background. So this time I tried a different tack. Instead of asking students to speak individually, I used an app, so that students could respond to my questions on their phone. Their answers were projected on a screen at the front of the room and, instead of engaging with almost no one, I was engaging almost everyone. It worked great, until I got to a seemingly innocuous question. I asked the students if they ever got together in

Last fall, just days before reading week, I found myself trying to hold the attention of 100 burned-out, overworked undergrads in a class at Toronto Metropolitan University. By that point in the semester, most students are more interested in a few days off than in listening to someone like me, a 31-year-old grad student and academic support coach delivering a workshop on study habits. I’d delivered these workshops before and always found it challenging to elicit engagement—the anonymity of being one face in a crowd makes it easy for students to fade into the background. So this time I tried a