Cottagecore, Marie Antoinette, and Microscopes

Recently, a client of mine who is teaching a graduate level class lamented that every time she tried to incorporate some much-needed team building exercises, her students appeared hesitant, distracted, and wanted to instead find refuge in their phones. 

Students are apprehensive about exposing themselves to any possible ridicule. For those of us who did not grow up with social media, we don't always understand this hesitancy. Rather than taking notes during a lecture, here is an opportunity to get to know your classmates — but as you get to know them, they also get to know you. Young people’s lives have been lived like fruit flies under a microscope. Every detail can be commented on, examined, and picked apart. 

Let’s compare my client’s dilemma to someone you may have studied in your history classes: Modern students have learned what Marie Antoinette learned after her years of ridicule and harassment within the court of Versailles for being unable to perform her “one job” (providing an heir and a spare). First, she became more and more outrageous at court, in the hope of controlling the narrative (i.e. her towering and extravagant hairdos being discussed, rather than her barren womb). Once she finally fulfilled her duty of birthing heirs, she gathered her children and few friends, and created an oasis within the grounds of the palace. She hid them within their thatched roof cottages, created a working farm, and quietly walked the isolated grounds far from the stinging and critical remarks of the palace. Marie was, perhaps, an original participant of a new trend: cottagecore. 

Women who have lived all their lives under microscopic scrutiny, and subsequent fear and anxiety of saying, doing, or being something considered inappropriate or unacceptable or foolish, now seek out a quiet, peaceful, isolated corner of the world to make their own—their little cottage. 

In order to be a successful and effective educator, you have to attempt to truly understand your audience, and realize that, sometimes, the activities you are confident are going to reach your audience may instead add to the heavy burden they already carry. Their dreams of hiding in their phones — or maybe their cottages by the sea or deep in the woods — represent a lifetime of adaptation.