We Created the Lotus Eaters

Why students don’t start, and how classroom design shapes motivation and independence

Man, I hope I don’t come off sounding like the old man yelling at clouds here…

I have a student in class. This story may sound familiar.

I pass out an assignment, get the class started on a problem, and tell them to get to work on it (my colloquialism is usually, “time for me to push you out of the nest, baby birds…”), and with this student… nothing starts.

Okay, it’s not a student—it’s a handful. Seeing them sets off no alarms. They’re not my 504 or IEP kids. Not defiant, not on their phones, not causing trouble.

They’re just…there.

Across the room, my groups of go-getters are getting going, and others start working—digging through notes or just getting pencil to paper. But among these kids, there’s a pocket of stillness.

“You okay there, _____?”

“Hmmm? Oh—yeah, I was just…”

Pencil in hand, just…staring.

And if I don’t circle back, it just continues. Heads down, or staring. A flat presence.

If I want to get work out of them, I have to sit beside them and push them every step. But if I’m not there, there’s no start. It’s as if something never flips—from “this is in front of me” to “I should do something about it.”

A lot of us label this as distraction, but it doesn’t feel like distraction. No phones out, nothing obviously pulling them away.

In this case, there’s no push. No start, and no desire to start.

And I’m seeing it more.

The Alternate Reality Mr. Brady

In another universe, I’m an English teacher and a best-selling writer. And that Mr. Brady loves his classics. Sometimes his thoughts leak into mine.

Driving to work the other day, I found myself thinking about The Odyssey. I just hope he liked the acid-base neutralization ideas that I offered in exchange.

The idea that stuck with me was the Lotus-eaters.

A quick revisit: The Odyssey isn’t just a travel story about a guy who can’t find his way home after the Trojan War. It’s a sequence of threats to identity. Every stop tests a different way a person can stop being who they’re supposed to be. Book 9’s Lotus-eaters are the lowest-energy version of that threat.

The Lotus-eaters aren’t monsters, like Circe or the Cyclops. They’re just…there. Odysseus has a goal, a plan. They don’t. They eat a honey-sweet plant, and they lose purpose. When Odysseus’ men eat it, they no longer want to go home — the one thing they’ve wanted the entire time.

No trap. No force. No enemy. Just a loss of desire.

Nothing is important anymore. The men lose their place—home, community, responsibility. They check out. And nothing Odysseus says can reach them. No reason, no logic. Their journey ends—not because they arrived, but because they no longer wanted to continue. Why bother? They were fine where they were.

The Lotus does not kill the body. It kills the thread connecting a person to home, duty, history, and self.

Odysseus isn’t having that and is brutal with his men. He drags them back to the ship and chains them to the benches to keep them there.

To them, he’s ripping them from peace.
To him, he’s saving them.

But let’s be clear—the Lotus-eaters are not “addicts” in the after-school-special sense. They’re not nihilistic or filled with despair about the futility of their journey or the future ahead of them. They’re people who found a soft world where nothing demands anything of them. No struggle. No grief. No friction. No longing. No future. Just enough sweetness to make leaving feel absurd.

Kind of hits you right in the face, doesn’t it?

There’s a reason they’re called classics.

Matt Damon as the beleaguered Odysseus in this summer’s The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan. I swear I’ve made this face in my classroom before. Maybe daily.

Don’t Take The Easy Way Out

At this point, there’s a road that’s easy to go down: just start pointing fingers. All of them. Blame the phones. Blame social media, AI, video games, parents, or participation trophy culture. Pick something, point at it, shrug shoulders, and move on. I’ve done it.

But that doesn’t hold up in the room.

I see this when the phones are in the rack at the front of the room, when the Chromebooks are closed. When there is nothing obvious pulling them away. The moment is still there. The assignment is in front of them. The pencil is in their hand. And nothing starts.

And the part I cannot shake is that the structure of school is not all that different from what I just described in The Odyssey.

We’ve spent years smoothing the path for them, rather than preparing them for the path forward. Countless hours devoted to making things clearer, smoother, and more accessible. Directions are broken into steps. Assignments are chunked. Rubrics spell out what success looks like. There are safety nets everywhere. Retakes, revisions, partial credit, credit recovery, a path back from almost any mistake.

The intent is good. We want them to succeed. But the easiest, cheapest, ‘look, we made a difference’ move is to remove friction from the path.

Friction is not just what makes work harder. It is what makes someone begin, and learning happen.

That first moment of uncertainty, where you do not quite know what to do, is not a flaw. It is the start of thinking. It is where effort begins.

We have been removing that moment.

When you remove it often enough, you do not get more motivated students. You get students who wait. Given friction, why engage?

Students who sit with something in front of them and do not know how to begin, unless the path is already laid out. Students have learned, over time, that if they wait long enough, the next step will be given to them.

We trained that. We created that world.

Of Running and Chemistry Labs.

I think about this a lot when I’m running.

There’s a line from Steven Pressfield that sticks with me. He talks about getting up early and doing hard workouts, not for fitness, but as rehearsal. Rehearsal for doing something you do not want to do. For doing something uncomfortable, for sitting down later and starting the real work.

That’s what this is. Starting is not automatic. It is practiced.

Pressfield’s friend, Randall Wallace, calls them “little successes.” Small things done early that build momentum. Not impressive. Not flashy. Just enough to get moving before the harder work shows up.

That is the part that connects for me. If I spend enough time doing hard things on purpose, I get better at starting hard things. If I spend enough time avoiding them, I get better at that, too.

My students are not any different. Why should they be?

I see this every time I change the structure.

Give them a lab that is not a recipe, where there is no step-by-step, no “add this, then this,” and watch what happens. They have the content. They have the tools. They have seen pieces of this before. Now they have to decide what matters and what does not. They have to choose a starting point.

Many of them stall. Not because they cannot think, but because they are not used to initiating the thinking. They are used to following it.

Give them a daisy-chained problem, where one step feeds the next and an early mistake carries forward, and the same pattern shows up. They can do each individual step if I isolate it. They have seen all the parts. But stringing them together, deciding what to use and when, maybe pulling in something from a previous unit, that is where things break down. Keeping it moving without a map is the problem.

They wait.

I see it in how they answer questions, too. Ask something in the same form we practiced, and they can run it back almost word-for-word. The structure is familiar, the path is clear, and they move.

Turn the question sideways, ask it from a different angle, the room goes quiet, and the grades drop. It’s the same content, they’re the same students, but my demand is different.

One requires recognition. The other requires construction.

Somewhere Along the Way, We Taught Them to Wait

We’ve gotten very good at teaching students how to follow a path. We haven’t been nearly as good at teaching them how to start one. We’ve accepted the line that they don’t like to sit with discomfort, and have moved to remove it if we can, from home to school to jobs.

But the thing is, the kids are not broken. They’re responding the way any organism responds to its environment. Build an environment where friction is removed, delay is minimized, and failure has little cost, and you should expect a preference for ease. You should expect hesitation when ease is not immediately available.

And school is not the only environment shaping that response.

The rest of their day is built the same way. Faster, smoother, easier to enter, and easier to leave.

They’re getting very good at living in that kind of world, one that offers them honey-sweet Lotus to eat.

You should expect stillness in the face of difficulty or anything requiring orthogonal thinking.

When something exists that removes friction completely, that fills time without uncertainty or effort, it doesn’t feel like a distraction. It feels like a better version of the same environment.

Of course they choose it. Of course they hesitate when it is not there. Most adults would make the same choice. We do make the same choice. Given an option between something that asks nothing and something that asks for effort, we are not as different from them as we like to think. The difference between them and us is that we created and perpetuated this world. It’s our responsibility to change it.

The Lotus-eaters are not a distant story. They’re sitting in our classrooms.

The assignment is in front of them. The pencil is in their hand. Nothing is pulling them away.

And, nothing starts.

They are not checked out. They are not acting out. They are not defiant.

They just … are.

No, Seriously, WTF?

It’s all very peculiar. We love stories about underdogs who face real setbacks and overcome them through their abilities. Medical dramas are popular, and Ryan and Rocky are cute and all, and part of it may be a reaction to the world we live in today, but there’s a deeper reason why The Pitt and Project Hail Mary do so well.

We want more Dr. Robbys and Ryland Craces in our world, yet we’ve created a production line that creates the opposite.

We idolize people who have overcome obstacles and kept moving forward. The world we have today, the inventions we cherish was/were not created by people who had every obstacle in their path removed.

Our response to those stories of struggles and uphill battles, many of which we still tell, is to remove obstacles for our kids and hope they do the same as our heroes.

What?

We created the island with the Lotus available for consumption, toss our kids on it, and somehow expect Odysseus to stride off of it as the end result?

How?

It’s the struggle that makes them.

It’s our time now to be those heroes. We built the environment that taught them to wait; it’s not serving them, so that’s the work in front of us now. Not finding something new to blame. Not searching for the next tool or strategy, or kicking the can down the road. Rather, building classrooms where starting is expected, where friction is part of the process, and where the first move belongs to them.

Because if nothing changes, we should not expect them to.

Dragging them back to the Ship

So what do I do with this?

In my room, the answer is not complicated, but it is deliberate.

I start by treating “beginning” as something that has to be taught. The first minute matters. I give them a clear first move. Not the whole path, just the start. Circle something. Write something. Try something.

As I put it, “just get the wheels turning, and something will catch.” I create pilot-style checklists for complex problems.

I don’t rush in to rescue. I give it a minute. Sometimes two. Long enough that they have to decide to do something without me. “Ask three before you ask me,” fits in here.

I tell them not to lock up because it’s “chemistry” or “physics,” and those subjects are tough and scary. Yeah, this should feel a little uncomfortable at first. That’s not a problem. That is where thinking starts.

I ask questions that do not look exactly like the ones we practiced. Same content, different angle. They have to build something, not just recognize it.

And I leave some things unsmoothed on purpose. Not every lab is a recipe or a problem that’s mapped out. There has to be a place where they have to decide how to begin.

None of this is flashy. It does not look like engagement as we have come to define it. It looks slower. It looks quieter. It looks like kids sitting with something and working their way into it.

It also works.

You start to see movement. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But you see more kids cross that line on their own. You see fewer of those pockets of stillness. They get better at what they rehearse.

That is what I can control.

At the school level, this gets harder because it is no longer just about one room.

If we say we value thinking, then we have to build time for it. That means fewer interruptions, longer stretches where students can actually sit with something without being pulled in five different directions.

It means agreeing, at least in part, on what we are trying to build. Not just coverage. Not just completion. Initiation. Persistence. The ability to start when the path is not obvious.

It means developing and protecting work that is not pre-scripted. Labs that are not recipes. Problems that are not already solved before students touch them. Those cannot be the exception. They have to be part of the design.

It also means being honest about what our assessments are actually measuring. If every question looks like the ones we practiced, then we are measuring recognition. We should not be surprised when students struggle the moment something looks different.

And this is where the conversation usually drifts toward “engagement.”

More engaging lessons. More hooks. More spectacle.

That’s not the answer.

A demo can get a kid to look up. It cannot teach them how to begin.

If anything, we have to be careful not to replace one version of passivity with another. Students who sit back and watch something impressive are still sitting back. We need to keep things engaging while reintroducing friction.

At the district level, the stakes are higher, and so is the responsibility.

This is where the conditions get set.

Policies around grading, retakes, and credit recovery matter. Not because they are right or wrong in isolation, but because of the patterns they create. If every failure can be undone without changing the approach or incurring meaningful consequences, then waiting becomes a strategy. And outside of school, there is very little that pushes back against that. Convenience is the default. Immediate is expected. Waiting feels wrong.

Curriculum design matters. If every task comes pre-scaffolded, pre-chunked, and pre-decided, then we are not teaching students how to think. We are teaching them pattern recognition and how to follow directions very well.

Professional development matters. If the focus is always on engagement strategies, then we are optimizing for attention, not initiation. Designing tasks with a clear first move, fading supports over time, writing questions that force students to decide how to begin, those should not be side conversations. That should be the work.

And at some point, there has to be an honest question asked.

What are we actually optimizing for?

If the answer is completion rates, pass rates, and the appearance of success, then what we are seeing in classrooms makes sense. We built a system that removes friction and rewards waiting for the next step. Students responded exactly the way you would expect.

People in charge should have known better. None of this is new. The relationship between environment and behavior is not complicated. If you remove the need to act, people will act less. Our students have grown to want and expect a world without friction.

So if we want something different, the system has to expect something different.

Not perfection. Not a constant struggle. But moments where students have to decide to begin without being walked there.

That is uncomfortable. It will not look as clean. It will not produce instant results. But it will produce students who move. And that, at the end of the day, is the point.

We trained them to wait.
They’re practicing that everywhere.
We can train them to start.

We can help them off the island.