What Students Poems Revealed About the Loss of the Third Place

Taking a brief break from the series on the pillars of AI-resistant assessment, I wanted to make a quick segue into an observation I recently had and ask whether anyone else has been noticing the same thing. Recently we had a teacher workday, and I was going through and grading my students’ latest writing project. The assignment was to write a poem with the focus of the prompt being “Home is where the heart is.” In short, students had to write a poem about the place that feels most like home to them and describe it using good descriptive language, age-appropriate vocabulary, figurative language, and so on.

Now while I was generally quite happy with the results from most of my students, there was something I noticed that I found deeply troubling. Looking back at this same module from previous years, I also noticed that this has become an accelerating trend. The overwhelming majority of students wrote that their home place—their happy place, the place where they feel most peaceful and relaxed—is their own bedroom, with the second largest group of students saying that their happy place, where they feel most at home, is inside their video games.

Now perhaps it is just me. Perhaps it is where I am. I would genuinely be interested in hearing from other educators if this is a pattern you are noticing as well. What I suspect we may be seeing is the loss of the third place.

In years past I might have gotten answers like the beach, baking cookies in Grandma’s kitchen, a place where they camped or hiked, or a neighborhood spot where they spent time with friends. For some students I still do get those kinds of answers. In fact, probably my third largest group of responses comes from students who write about missing their home or their country of origin, which always makes for excellent poems and thoughtful work. But the loss of the third place raises a deeper concern. If a student’s entire life is spent inside their bedroom or inside their video games, then the role of education becomes significantly more important than we may have previously realized. In many ways it means that school may now be their only window onto the wider world.

While students today technically have access to the totality of human knowledge and could virtually travel almost anywhere, it often seems that they never actually leave those small digital spaces. Instead they spend time watching TikToks—content that even the students themselves refer to as “brainrot”—designed for high engagement but very low thought requirements. This is where we get things like skibidi toilets and endless viral trends: content designed for engagement, not for intellect. It does not widen their understanding of the world, and it does not build the kind of background knowledge that earlier generations often absorbed almost accidentally. In some ways the student world has become smaller, even though the internet should have made it larger. Many of the poems that talked about the bedroom described it as the place where they could sit on their phone and watch videos. That, in their words, was what made them feel better.

Functionally, this means that anything they might learn about another country, another time, another language, or even another way of thinking may only be coming through the few hours we have them in school. And for many students, they spend much of that time mentally detoxing from the constant stimulation of their phones while already craving the next digital hit they will get once they can return to it. This creates a double problem. Students who struggle to focus without a screen in front of them are also students whose background knowledge about the world has shrunk significantly. Things that once might have been considered common knowledge for students are no longer common knowledge, which means many of our assessments begin to break down. 

A good example happened several months ago when we were doing a short essay about a woman who works in an elk rehabilitation program. The students had to decide, using evidence from the text, whether her job was important or not. But the biggest question the students all had was very simple: “What is an elk?”

Without that background information, they had no real capacity to determine whether the job was important or not, because they did not even know what kind of animal was being saved.

I noticed something similar again later this year, although at the time I had not yet connected the dots. Students were writing a report on Amelia Earhart and had to decide whether they believed she was a hero or not. More than one student argued that she was not a hero because the story said she “flew places,” but people cannot fly in real life—only superheroes can do that. Since superheroes are not real, they concluded that she could not be a real hero either. Now we might laugh at that explanation, but the unfortunate reality is that the essay they were reading never actually mentioned that she flew an airplane. It simply said she “flew.” The author of the grade-level text assumed that students already knew that Amelia Earhart was a pilot. If a student did not already know that, they had to make a very large inference to understand what kind of flying the text was talking about.

It was the same with the elk story. The text never explained what an elk actually was, so unless students already had that background knowledge, they were left hanging. I do not have a solution to this yet, but I do think it is a conversation worth having. Is there a way for us as educators to open up the wider world to our students again? Or are we gradually resigning ourselves to the fact that we will need to provide basic background knowledge on nearly every topic before students can even begin forming meaningful thoughts about it? Are these patterns something you have noticed in your classrooms as well? What kinds of examples or experiences have you seen?