by Vladimir Latocha, OLY PhD, [email protected]
First published: Dec 9th, 2024
Last update: Apr 6th 2025
Abstract
In the current academic landscape, university students face growing challenges related to attention, motivation, and mental well-being—challenges that traditional pedagogical tools often fail to address effectively. This article proposes an alternative framework rooted in both academic practice and high-performance sport, drawing on the author’s Olympic experience, which was applied to a course taught for over a decade. Through the use of oblique strategies—indirect, experiential methods that avoid triggering resistance while providing leverage—students are encouraged to develop autonomy, resilience, and sustainable learning habits. This article outlines physiological and psychological foundations for these strategies, introduces a series of guided experiments aimed at recalibrating sensitivity to discomfort and restoring motivation, and presents a case study of a long-running course that successfully integrates these methods. The result is a practical, adaptable model for supporting academic success while promoting overall well-being.
Both Teachers and Students Need the Situation to Improve: A Path Forward**
In today’s educational landscape, both teachers and students face pressing challenges that call for a reevaluation of how we support learning and growth in academia. To build effective strategies, let us empathise with both teachers and students.
Modern students face unprecedented distractions that directly impact their ability to focus and learn effectively. In a world rich with constant stimuli—from social media and gaming to rapid technological advances—they are frequently engaged in brief, high-reward interactions that saturate their dopamine levels. This saturation leads to an inevitable cycle of craving, distraction, and diminished motivation for tasks that require sustained attention and effort, such as studying.
Additionally, with the rise of accessible artificial intelligence tools, students sometimes fall into the “illusion of achievement” trap, where they feel productive or knowledgeable without deeply engaging with the material. While AI can be a powerful tool, its misuse can lead to superficial learning, giving students the impression that they’re progressing when, in reality, they are skimming the surface. A good metaphor would be the following: if you go to the gym and use a forklift to lift your weights, you miss the point.
Moreover, the pressures of academic and social expectations are contributing to increasing rates of anxiety and depression among students. Navigating a high-stakes educational environment while maintaining mental health is more challenging than ever, and students need support systems that address these underlying issues.
Teachers, too, are affected by these challenges. Many find themselves struggling to capture and maintain students' attention in an environment where engagement is hard-won. There is a palpable loss of efficiency as students often divert their focus to devices or applications, even within the classroom setting. This fragmentation of attention undermines the quality of education teachers strive to provide and leaves many educators feeling they are compromising on the high standards they had envisioned for their careers.
Furthermore, there is a profound sense of dismay among educators who witness students struggle and strain under the weight of academic and mental health challenges. Teachers naturally want their students to succeed, yet they see them caught in cycles of stress and procrastination, often compounded by the very academic pressure meant to drive their progress.
This “dragging to mediocrity” not only affects individual student outcomes but can also erode institutional quality. When high potential is under-realised, both teachers and institutions bear the cost, with long-term implications for educational standards.
Many of the solutions currently in place inadvertently create additional stress or fail to address root causes. For example: