This week in one of my classes in the middle of a lecture, one of my students asked me a question I wasn’t prepared for.

“Should I continue my bachelor’s with the current situation?”

It was an honest, vulnerable, and completely unpredictable question. And I’ll be honest, it took me a moment to unravel the subtext of her question. I paused. The kind of pause where you realize the answer matters more than the current course I’m trying to teach.

I told her: now more than ever. With the rapid advances in AI, cybersecurity is becoming one of the most in-demand fields out there. The world isn’t slowing down, it’s accelerating. And the people who understand how to protect systems, data, and infrastructure will be needed more than ever before.

But I want to take a step back from that “purely technical” answer. It’s the question. And what it says about the kind of pressure our students are going through right now.

The Voice in the Back of Our Heads

For the past month or so, the sound of sirens has become part of daily life in Kuwait. You hear them at odd hours. At first they stop you in your tracks. Then, slowly, you start to move through them. The constant negative news we read everyday and the gloomy future outlook does not help either. This instability has been taking a toll on everyone, especially the students. It builds slowly, until you look around and realize things aren’t really normal anymore.

During classes, we talk about the course material. We review our progress. We discuss exam questions. Everything looks like it’s working. But no body wants to address the elephant in the room: should we even be focusing on this right now?

What the Classroom Really Looks Like Now

The materials are being delivered to the best of our ability. But the experience of teaching online (I mean truly teaching, not just presenting), is something else entirely.

Students are quieter, cameras are off and responses are short. I can’t blame them, it is hard to focus on coursework when the world outside your window doesn’t feel safe and no one knows for sure when all of this will end.

I feel for my students. There’s a helplessness that comes with being a teacher in moments like this. You’ve prepared everything, but none of it addresses what’s really in the way: my students are anxious, carrying weight they shouldn’t have to carry, and they’re just trying to get through the day.

I adjust, and slow down. Usually my classes are really dry, but now I try to crack a joke or two every class to make the session feel less like a class and more like a space where we can breathe and talk. The class has become like a meetup where we feel a little bit normal in the middle of all the chaos happening around us, and that is ok.

What Resilience Actually Looks Like

I’ve spent most of my career working at the intersection of technology and education — building tools and systems meant to make learning easier. I believe in good infrastructure and tools that don’t get in the way. But it was never about the tools, It was always about the people.

What I’ve seen over the past month is that resilience is not dramatic at all. It’s a lecturer trying to engage students in unusual ways and completely coming off cringy, but doing it anyway, because awkward beats silent. It’s a student turning on their camera and sharing their screen to walk their colleagues through a technical issue, just because they wanted to help. It’s a colleague getting creative with new ways to assess progress and measure learning when the old ways simply don’t work anymore. It’s students organizing club activities, holding online events to inspire their peers, figuring out how to give each other some sense of normality when the world outside won’t. It’s a parent opening up Teams for their kids and pushing them to attend classes. Even my nephew in kindergarten is restless — he just wants to see his friends again.

That’s what resilience actually looks like. To everyone carrying that weight right now — students, teachers, parents, I see you and I’m rooting for you.

The Honest Conversation

To end this post, yesterday I met a friend at the coffee shop and we talked about online learning and how it’s impacting the way students actually learn, and the undeniable engagement bottlenecks we’re facing. Now I think about it, it is not fair to blame online learning as some of the students are actually being more active online than in person. It is the combination of online learning, loss of motivation, and the current circumstances all coming together to create the perfect storm. Each one is manageable on its own, but together they are quietly eroding the learning experience in ways that are hard to measure but impossible to ignore.

At some point during our conversation she asked me what I really thought about this semester. I didn’t have to think long.

I told her: I don’t mind if this semester is forgotten, as long as things go back to normal and I see my students again.

That’s where I am. That’s the honest truth. The grades, the deadlines, the curriculum — none of it matters as much as seeing my students walk back into a classroom again safe and sound. Everything else, we will figure it out as we go.