[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
There is nothing like working on a group project to convince you that most college students (other than you) are lazy, whiny, and shouldn’t have passed third grade.
I wonder, I’m sitting on a plane next to a women with high school kids who is going on and on about how competitive college is nowadays. How they HAVE TO GET the best possible hgih school grades, excel in sports. And I’m saying “certainly, if you want to go to Harvard or Princeton, but you can’t tell me this is true of St. Cloud State” and she says it is. But I just graduated from the same system as St. Cloud State, and I’m here to tell you that most of my classmates were mouth breathing shaved monkeys. Have we reached a point in higher education where the distribution is purely binary - great colleges and colleges for yahoos?
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Well, St. Cloud State is clearly a college for yahoos, and nothing else.
Go Bulldogs!
I score assessment test essays and place people into ESL, remedial, or writing classes in college based on their scores. Over the past few years, we’ve noticed that more and more incoming students are ending up in the remedial courses.
One administrator commented that “the test scores are too low.”
Well, I certainly agree that they are low, but we are giving them the scores that they have earned.
[QUOTE=dangermom]
:eek: That’s an upper-level elective class?
I read all these threads on the SD about college students and I get really depressed. Has it always been like this? I don’t remember this from my college days. There’s something wrong and I don’t know how to fix it! I know all kids aren’t like this; the few college students I know are mostly very hard workers with ambitions.
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Yeah it’s a 4000 level (senior level but open to juniors/seniors). Elective psychology class. Only majors would really ever take it. It’s one of those classes that looks good for grad school. Not offered too often, and only one section. The material is difficult because there’s so much of it, and lots of names and theories and ideas you need to have mastery over. But it’s just names/dates/facts basically. And he’s making it soooo easy!
At Boston College, kids do whine sometimes but it hasn’t interfered with class in my experience. The only thing similar to the OP is usually students want to know EXACTLY how a test will be made and what to expect. I guess it’s fair but sometimes it gets really nit-picky and annoying.
I can’t help thinking that part of it is because parents and high school teachers do so much more hands-on guidance these days. Once the kids get to college where they have to do it more on their own they don’t have any idea what to do. It seems so many high schools are trying so hard to make sure the kids succeed through high school they forget to let them learn to succeed in life.
[QUOTE=thirdwarning]
I can’t help thinking that part of it is because parents and high school teachers do so much more hands-on guidance these days. Once the kids get to college where they have to do it more on their own they don’t have any idea what to do. It seems so many high schools are trying so hard to make sure the kids succeed through high school they forget to let them learn to succeed in life.
[/QUOTE]
I agree with this. It’s gotten to the point where no one will even deign to criticize a high school student for fear of screwing up his/her life…FOR-EVAH! :rolleyes:
At this point in time, it’s pretty much a consensus that you need a college education to get a good job. (Not always true, but it’s the popular belief.) So stopping a kid short of that seems like cruel torture. High school is no longer part of the educational experience, it’s just a stepping stone to what really matters. So kids are coddled all the way up, because “every kid needs to go straight to college,” even if he or she is a lazy, unmotivated, mouthbreathing monkey.
And you know, a few years in the workforce really does seem to cure the academic laziness. If nothing else, it sure does help. Having to work a shitty job to pay for your education usually makes one sober up quite a bit.
[QUOTE=thirdwarning]
I can’t help thinking that part of it is because parents and high school teachers do so much more hands-on guidance these days. Once the kids get to college where they have to do it more on their own they don’t have any idea what to do. It seems so many high schools are trying so hard to make sure the kids succeed through high school they forget to let them learn to succeed in life.
[/QUOTE]
I always knew deep in my heart of hearts that dropping out of high school in the ninth grade was one of my better fuckups.
I’m a biology major, and a mature student (like WhyNot, I find that I tend to do better than my classmates because I do what the freaking prof tells me!). I think that there are really only a few whiny kids in each class, but they are just so vocal it seems like they are everywhere. Certainly I know that there are other people who do their work, come to class, and pay attention (and manage to stay sober much of the time, which as far as I can tell is often half the fight).
Still, the whiny kids are extremely aggravating, and it is hard to understand where they come from - this is a good, well regarded school with reasonable entrance requirements. My only hope is that with each passing year, more and more of them are weeded out and forced to drop out and return to Podunk, New Brunswick and pump gas for a living.
My personal favorite whine is, upon seeing a C+ on a biology exam “But I neeeeed to get into medical school!”
Once I finish my MA this spring, I won’t be pursuing a PhD, and I will not be sticking around in Academia. I don’t know what I’ll do, honestly. All I know is that college students really really really ruin the whole teaching experience. I think I’m a good teacher and my supervisors agree, but I don’t think I can do one more semester of this, much less make a career out of it.
[QUOTE=myskepticsight]
These people spent over 10 minutes of class time (when we should have been going over the material they got wrong) bitching about the difficulty of the questions.
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When my nephew complained about similar class time being wasted like this, I told him it was his problem if he let it continue without any objection.
So he stood up in class and said to the professor “I’m paying over $90 an hour, about $1.60 per minute to attend this class. Are we going to spend the rest of this class listening to this whining, or am I going to get some actual teaching for my tuition? 'Cause if not, I’ll just go to the library and read the textbook”.
The professor was startled enough to cut off the whining, telling students to see him during office hours about that, and to start in on that days’ lecture. And for the rest of the course he was pretty attentive to not letting any student waste class time.
I told my nephew afterward that I had been thinking of a quiet complaint to the professor during office hours, not a public comment in the classroom. And that many professors would have felt threatened by this, rather than feeling that their teaching was so valued, so it might not go over that well with many teachers. But he replied that it did so in this case.
I think it has always been this way. I think the reason that you see a lot of adult students doing better is that they chose to be there rather than having been pushed by their parents to go to college and “make” something of yourself.
I think college students have always been lazy. I remember taking International Studies my senior year and thinking how could anybody find this class difficult? The prof spoon fed us the answers and worse the class notes were posted online so you didn’t even have to write anything down. I quit going to the main lecture and just attended the small group class on Fridays. Some of my classmates complained because the tests were essay instead of multiple choice. :rolleyes:
I think college has always been that way, but I don’t remember the whining from the first time. If you were lazy, you didn’t want the Prof or the other students to know that you hadn’t bothered to read the syllabus or that you hadn’t done the reading - so you kept your mouth shut. If there were whiners, they did it during office hours (and I remember profs telling me about whiners - but during office hours).
[QUOTE=myskepticsight]
I took it because the TA for the class told me all the grad schools she looked into were interested in whether she took this class.
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I feel you.
However, I think this really gets at the problem (and I’m not saying you did the wrong thing here). People are taking classes for a million reasons, from “it’s an easy A” to “it’ll look good in grad school.” But nowdays it’s pretty rare for someone to take a class because they actually want to learn the material or think it will be useful in their professional life. College has, like high school, been divorced from the actual idea of learning something. Everyone is just putting in time and paying out so that they can get that piece of paper in the end. Whether or not they learn a thing is irrelevent.
And colleges, being essentially commercial establishments like any other business, have no choice but to go with the flow.
Which, of course, leads to the education bar being upped once again, and now the actual learning is supposed to happen in grad school. Which means the people who really want to learn have to put up and pay out for four years of bullshit, and then pay out again for the education they should have got from the beginning.
We need to make high school harder, so that college isn’t required to get employment. And we need to make college about learning, not putting in time.
One of my favorite college professors was a history teacher. He made his classes write a couple of 10 page papers each semester. More and more students started dropping his class after the first week, saying that they did not want to write 10 page papers. His department head suggested to him that the other history teachers were moving to multiple choice tests so maybe he should consider doing so to keep students in his classes, since the students didn’t want to write papers.
So he quit. I sure missed taking his classes, but I respected him for doing it.
FTR, I took some of those other history classes with the multiple choice tests, and didn’t learn jack shit. Multiple choice is a horrible way to test college level history.
I hear you. I just got a nice e-mail from a student saying (paraphrased), “I don’t know what other people are complaining about–you’ve been very clear about what’s due when. I’m enjoying the class and want to be sure that that side is brought to your attention, too.” It made my day after 5 e-mails from people who couldn’t find information that was the unit they were just supposed to have read.
[QUOTE=NinjaChick]
I love, love, love my school. Because of it’s many, many eccentricities, you don’t usually have to put up with that shit: if you perpetually slack off, there’s A) no final exam to cram for to save your ass and B) you’ll probably get kicked out of the college at the end of the semester. It happened to me, and I chose to grow the hell up and try again a year later.
But when I took a couple Community College courses…oy. Never again.
Sorry you’re having an unpleasant time, myskepticsight.
[/QUOTE]
Amen.
But, NinjaChick, it artificially inflates one’s faith in humanity, and makes the rest of life soooooo annoying.
Back when I took a US History class in junior college (1972), I got one of those teachers that no one wanted. At that time, when you enrolled, you went around in a huge room, found the table for the subject you wanted to take, and signed up on the spot. If you didn’t have a teacher you prefered, or that teachers classes were full, they gave you the teacher at the bottom of the list that no one requested.
I got Mr. Stutzenberg. He was a great history teacher. He used a book for guidance, but he didn’t need it - he knew the material. He basically lectured on the stuff you were supposed to have read before class, and kept things interesting by adding all sorts of anecdotes and stories that weren’t in the book, but special or humorous nonetheless.
You always knew that when he stopped, turned to the class and carefully said something slow and clearly, it was an important thing and it would later be on a test or quiz. He told us this at the beginning of the semester and he stuck to it. If you just paid scant attention, and wrote down just what he emphasized, you could pass his class.
Students dropped out in droves. They complained when they got a poor grade that he didn’t go over the test material or that he should grade on a curve. They whined and bitched a lot.
After being told that we would be required to identify all the individual states on a blank map, many complained about how difficult it was going to be because " there was, like, almost fifty of them!"
What a bunch of idiots! He probably had the easiest history class on campus. You had to be severely stupid not to pass, even if you did a minimal amount of work.
I think his class was so easy, most of the students developed a new level of lazy just for his class that would probably have passed for brain-dead had they been medically examined.
I never really realized what whiny bitches college students were until my senior year of college, when I took my ‘‘required by just about every major’’ Statistics 350 course. Up until that point I had been spoiled with mostly relatively intimate discussion seminars.
There were about 700 people or so in my STATS lecture, and half of them were insufferable assholes. People didn’t just talk in the back row, they talked in the front row, talked on cell phones, laughed and joked around with their friends, and at times generated such a buzz of activity that I couldn’t hear anything. The prof would sometimes stop in the middle of lecture out of frustration.
This was astonishing to me. In high school, tools make sense – but you (or your parents) actually pay for college, and theoretically you’re supposed to be an adult.
And then I remember my last day of Spanish class, in which nobody had done the reading so the professor launched into an informal (English) discussion of ‘‘Why does this shit matter?’’ The response was overwhelmingly, ‘‘It doesn’t actually matter, I just picked Spanish because I didn’t know what else to do and now I’m going to graduate and I’m scared because I’ve never had to support myself before.’’
There are not words to describe how irritating and depressing I found that. I put a great deal of effort into my major because I feel it has incredible relevance and it is one of my great life passions. It is amazing to me that these children had every potential career option imaginable open to them and they chose something pretty much at random. It is pretty insulting when you care about something that much to find out nobody else really gives a shit, and I can’t imagine how insulted the prof must have felt (though he didn’t seem particularly traumatized, I guess it was nothing new.)
Not to mention the whole, ‘‘Poor me I’m going to have to pay for my own shit.’’ Give me a fucking break.
I know all kids aren’t like this; the few college students I know are mostly very hard workers with ambitions.