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The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.

or says, is to "maximize the likelihood that students will get the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought.

So the challenge for a teacher is to find that sweet spot of mental difficulty, and to find it simultaneously for 25 students, each with a different level of preparation.

Rather, we remember what we think about, and that can have non-obvious consequences. During frog dissection, are students thinking about anatomy or that they find it gross?