Why Students Don’t Care About Grades Anymore —

A few years ago, I started noticing something quietly terrifying in my classroom: the silence wasn’t just quiet—it was apathetic.

Students weren’t arguing about grades anymore. They stopped asking why something got marked wrong. Some didn’t even bother to turn things in. They just stared. Shrugged. Or worse—they smiled and said, “It’s fine, I’ll take the zero.” For a teacher who used to believe that a well-placed F could light a fire under a student, this was disorienting.

At first, I blamed phones. TikTok. Pandemic trauma. Pandemic laziness. I tried all the classic remedies: stickers, extra credit, parent calls, emotional pep talks, even “relevance hooks” about how this assignment could apply to future jobs. Nothing stirred them. It wasn’t disobedience. They weren’t hostile. They were disconnected.

That scared me more than any teenager rebellion ever could.

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The Great Disconnect

The truth hit me during a parent-teacher conference when a mother asked, “Does my son seem… sad in class?” I realized this wasn’t just about grades or motivation. These students weren’t refusing to work because they were lazy—they were numb. They were exhausted. Their identities aren’t built around achievement the way previous generations were encouraged (or forced) to be. Many of them don’t believe success is real—or possible. They’re not worried about GPAs. They’re worried about whether they’ll even have a livable future.

So if grades aren’t motivating them, what is?

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What They Actually Respond To

Over time, I started noticing small moments that did spark something real:

• A note on the top of an assignment: “You wrote this beautifully. Can I show it to the class?”

• Letting a student stay inside during lunch just to quietly sit near the classroom plants or draw.

• Asking, “You look heavy today. What’s going on?” and actually giving space for them to answer.

And yes, they often still didn’t turn in the assignment. But they started making eye contact again. They’d send me an email with a meme after class. They’d bring me a weird rock they found on the way to school. They’d say, “Miss, I didn’t do the homework but I was thinking about that question we talked about.” That’s not laziness. That’s a spark. It’s small—and it’s everything.

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This Isn’t Just Gen Z “Softness”

We like to joke that “kids these days are soft,” or that they don’t know how to work hard. But we’re living in a time when adults are quiet quitting their jobs. People in their 30s are burnt out. People in their 50s want to retire early and homestead with goats. Are we really surprised that 15-year-olds have emotionally checked out of our point systems and rubrics?

We told them for years that they had to get straight A’s, go to college, get a good job, and buy a house. Then they watched it become unachievable in real time. So no—they don’t care about grades because the system showed them grades might not save them.

What do they crave instead? To feel safe. To feel seen. To feel real. To matter to at least one adult who isn’t lecturing them.

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So Now What?

As teachers, we are being asked to be educators, therapists, social media filters, motivational speakers, and crisis counselors. We’re drowning too. I don’t have a magic formula—only what I’ve seen work on a microscopic, human scale:

1. Create one place in your classroom where the stakes are low. A corner, a journal, a daily doodle list. Something that counts, even if it’s not graded.

2. Instead of “Why didn’t you do the assignment?” try “What got in the way?” It changes everything.

3. Share your own small struggles. Not trauma dumping—but honesty. “I forgot to eat breakfast and my brain barely works today.” They connect to vulnerability more than authority.

Students still complete work for me. Some fail my class anyway. But many of them still come back to visit. They email me after they graduate. Sometimes the kid who never passed my essays is the one who hugs me hardest at the end of the year.

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Maybe Grades Aren’t the Point?

I still grade. I still teach writing and reading and structure. But I’ve stopped believing the grade is the thing that leads them to success. Most of them won’t remember the rubric score. They will remember whether they felt acknowledged.

Maybe they don’t need more motivation. Maybe they need relief. Maybe education is shifting from “proving you can do it” to “proving that someone cares enough to help you do it at all.” And maybe, just maybe, that’s not the end of education. It might be the beginning of something we should have been doing all along.

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