Last April, I was a month out from the end of the spring semester when I read in The Chronicle about the “stunning’ level of student disconnection.” At the time, I was teaching three in-person courses, two of them large, and speaking to a lot of empty seats. The story confirmed what I already knew in a vividly depressing way: Students were checked out.

In fact, judging by class attendance, they were even more checked out last spring than they’d been in the fall. I started to wonder: What would my students say about why they were skipping class? And what could we as faculty members do to re-engage them?

So I put together an online survey of 10 mostly open-ended questions and offered the link to 245 students in two of my courses. I’d hoped 50 would respond, but 175 did. And they wrote a lot. The 73-percent response rate to an online survey that required written answers told me that my students did care about school — even if they were not showing up — and they wanted to be heard.