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[fiona]

http://chronicle.com/article/Going-Backstage-in-Students/48789/

I found this article interesting, true, and sad.

My students, like the author's, have such fragmented lives that they turn in papers that seem to be written in 5-minute spurts. Sometimes they use punctuation, but not always. This is the first semester in which I've gotten papers that seem to be written as textings--i. e., no capitals, no punctuation, all one run-on sentence.

There's no coherent though, either, and often points are just repeated, as if there was no central intelligence even rereading (never mind proofreading) what was produced.

As for students' reading whole books, or even whole chapters--seems to be less and less possible.

Yeah, I know every generation is worse than the previous one, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to vent.

The Fiona

[scampster]

Now some faculty members may argue that students should simply be less involved. If they have to work, they should cut out some extracurricular activities and focus on their academic work. That approach is certainly the one I took in college, but our students are not in the same position as I was. When English majors ask me for a letter of recommendation, I tell them that it will write itself if they've been solid students in my courses, been active in our English honor society (which I sponsor), and have worked in our department's writing center or as a teaching assistant for one of our composition courses.

However, none of them have only done that work, as they know that much more is required of them when they apply to graduate school or go out on the job market. What I mention is the bare minimum, and they know that it is because they hear their peers talking inside and outside of class. They feel they must be competitive, as the woman on their right is president of the student government while the man on their left is doing an internship in a local politician's office.

I think it is a myth that students need to be uber-involved to be competitive for grad school and jobs. I definitely made the mistake of trying to do too many things in college and my grades suffered for it (and I accepted those consequences and never once whined about a grade to a professor). By my senior year I had figured out how to handle 5 science/engineering classes at a time, a 20-hr/week job, a varsity sport, an officer position in a large engineering organization, and running a community service program, and get As (and that was my reduced list of extracurriculars).

If students are doing their papers shoddily, then they are probably doing some of their extracurriculars shoddily. Haven't we all been told since HS that it was better to do a few things really well than to do a lot of things poorly? I don't see why students today deserve a free pass because they have no time. It's called prioritizing and it is a skill you need for the rest of your life.

Of course, I have never been on the hiring end of things (except for undergrad RAs) so maybe admissions committees and companies want to see overly involved students.

[archman]

Yeah, I know every generation is worse than the previous one, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to vent.

I remember reading a report that actually tracked educational success (or something like that) in the U.S. population since the 1950's. The study found that americans actually improved in "smarts" (or whatever was being used as assessment) with successive generations.

Americans showed improvement that is, until recently. The report showed that this most recent generation of americans is actually worse than previous ones. This was the first time since the 1950's that the report's data showed regression.

I know this is very vague, and I apologize. I have absoutely no recollection as to who did this study and what the particulars were. I wish I did, since I bring this up at least twice a month in idle chit-chat...

[zuzu_]

That article rang true for me. I was a Theatre undergrad in the latter half of the nineties--before ubiquitous access to the internet.

Sun-Thurs, we would have rehearsal from 6-10.
Mon-Fri, I had classes from 8-5, and in between all classes, I worked at my on-campus work study job.
Most days, between 5-6, I would have rehearsal for some scene in which I was acting or directing
Fri-Sat, I worked at a restaurant from 6PM-3AM.
I carried my homework with me everywhere, and I just snatched ten minutes here, five minutes there to get everything done.

I have never been so busy in my life as I was in undergrad. And right now I teach a 6/6/4 load and have two small children. It really taught me time managment--I have mad skills in time managment.

[temporaryname]

Interesting article, but I don't see what was so new about it--as zuzu points out for us, this fragmentation and overscheduling of students' lives has been going on for a good while now. In my own experience, it was the same (even for us non-fine arts folks) in the eighties.

Part of what college (or at least the deadline-centered nature of college) is for, as I see it, is to force people to learn time management and prioritization if they haven't already. Do rehearsals and parties and jobs and family take a higher priority than schoolwork? Maybe yes, maybe no, and the choices made may be good choices or bad choices, but students are going to have to make those choices.

All of us are busy, after all. If you expected that your students weren't until you read this article, you're either blind or generalizing from your own very boring life.

[fiona]

As someone who taught in the 80s (and, of course, the 1880s as well), I disagree with the previous poster who says this is nothing new, everyone's always been busy.

Not like this. In the 1980s, you could still assign students to read a whole book, and they would do it. Now they can't concentrate, fragmented as they are by cell phones, the Net, Facebook, videogames, and chronic other distractions as well as jobs and assignments.

The concept of curling up with a good book (never mind a bad one) is pretty much unknown. Which means that whole areas of knowledge--a lot of history, most of the literature before the 20th century--is out of reach for them.

Yeah, of course I'm an old fart, but I'm sorry that so much of our past is just going to be lost, because no one cares about the knowledge or can read and assimilate it.

The Fiona

[sad_goat]

http://chronicle.com/article/Going-Backstage-in-Students/48789/

I found this article interesting, true, and sad.

My students, like the author's, have such fragmented lives that they turn in papers that seem to be written in 5-minute spurts. Sometimes they use punctuation, but not always. This is the first semester in which I've gotten papers that seem to be written as textings--i. e., no capitals, no punctuation, all one run-on sentence.

There's no coherent though, either, and often points are just repeated, as if there was no central intelligence even rereading (never mind proofreading) what was produced.

As for students' reading whole books, or even whole chapters--seems to be less and less possible.

Yeah, I know every generation is worse than the previous one, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to vent.

The Fiona

Pots v. kettels?

[colette_capricious]

The concept of curling up with a good book (never mind a bad one) is pretty much unknown. Which means that whole areas of knowledge--a lot of history, most of the literature before the 20th century--is out of reach for them.

Yeah, of course I'm an old fart, but I'm sorry that so much of our past is just going to be lost, because no one cares about the knowledge or can read and assimilate it.

The Fiona

While this may be true in the aggregate, I just don't see it as applying to everyone. All three of my kids curl up with books, good or bad, every night. My 13 year old loves Dickens. (I have never read much Dickens, to tell you the truth.) I can't keep them in books. We're big library users.  They also listen to audibooks. I'm way to ADD to focus on that!

They have unlimited access to the internet and the TV, so it's not an issue of having nothing else to do.

Of course living in London helps because they need something to do on the tube. Maybe they'll be at an advantage when they're in college?

[prof_smartypants]

It seems to me that the generational difference is primarily in the acceptance of the consequences for decisions. (I'm 33, for full disclosure). I knew many, many people who took on too much in undergrad and failed out or did poorly. Me, I had a 3.2 gpa and many extracurriculars. My grades suffered, but looking back, I wouldn't have changed anything. Things worked out in the end.

It seems that my students now seem to expect to be able to have a "full time" job, sport, and school without suffering any consequences in any venue. I'm not sure why they think this. I think we (as in, higher education in general) are doing them a disservice by allowing them to continue believing this fantasy that they can have it all.

What's wrong with failing a class? Or failing out of school entirely? Gets your priorities straight.

[temporaryname]

As someone who taught in the 80s (and, of course, the 1880s as well), I disagree with the previous poster who says this is nothing new, everyone's always been busy.

Not like this. In the 1980s, you could still assign students to read a whole book, and they would do it. Now they can't concentrate, fragmented as they are by cell phones, the Net, Facebook, videogames, and chronic other distractions as well as jobs and assignments.

The concept of curling up with a good book (never mind a bad one) is pretty much unknown. Which means that whole areas of knowledge--a lot of history, most of the literature before the 20th century--is out of reach for them.

Yeah, of course I'm an old fart, but I'm sorry that so much of our past is just going to be lost, because no one cares about the knowledge or can read and assimilate it.

Maybe they used to be hidden better? I'd say that the specific distractions may be different, but the fact of their existence isn't. Cell phones and laptops may have changed the immediacy of some of the distractions, but students have been coming to class with hangovers or exhausted from socially-oriented all-nighters probably since the middle ages, if not before. (Actually, the immediacy thing may be why you're more likely to see direct evidence of the distractions now than you used to.)

Remember also, most of us here were the "good kids" in college, and I think that may color thoughts about these things. I wasn't (I flunked out as an undergrad, as I've posted elsewhere), so I know firsthand how intense the distractions could be.

[janewales]

I'd agree that the despair is a bit sweeping. My current Honours seminar is stuffed with kids who read whole books-- big, difficult whole books. Of course they're a self-selecting group, but they're still with us, even as they too own cell phones, laptops etc... I do sometimes ask my big senior classes what they read for fun, and quite a few don't read much in an extracurricular way (the rest are pretty evenly divided between Jane Austen and fantasy novels)-- but they also don't seem to watch TV much, or go to the movies much. What they do is work, and school, and often some kind of volunteer thing. And they do indeed play video games (but then, so do I). And you know, I've been at this for 20 years, and their writing isn't appreciably worse than it was when I started. Or perhaps I'm just getting soft in my old age.

My uni is difficult to get into-- could that be part of it?

[kedves]

The author is generalizing about "students today" based on his observations backstage of theater participants at his school, at which 40% are first-generation college students.  

[annmarie]

http://chronicle.com/article/Going-Backstage-in-Students/48789/

I found this article interesting, true, and sad.

My students, like the author's, have such fragmented lives that they turn in papers that seem to be written in 5-minute spurts. Sometimes they use punctuation, but not always. This is the first semester in which I've gotten papers that seem to be written as textings--i. e., no capitals, no punctuation, all one run-on sentence.

There's no coherent though, either, and often points are just repeated, as if there was no central intelligence even rereading (never mind proofreading) what was produced.

As for students' reading whole books, or even whole chapters--seems to be less and less possible.

Yeah, I know every generation is worse than the previous one, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to vent.

The Fiona

I do perceive a problem with students' focus.  And other posters seem to have indicated that the problem might be that students do not seem to believe that there are tradeoffs.  if you want to spend time on a extra-curricular activity, do it.  However, know that your studies might suffer if you do. 

What has not be stated here is that the problem does not seem to have started this year or last year.  Even 10 years ago, students did not put the time in that some intellectual work required.

[advil]

The best example I saw of this approach to studying was what our assistant stage manager did one night of our performance. She had rushed downstairs during intermission, then come back up to complete her night of work. I asked her what she was doing, and she explained that she was working on a quiz. It had been posted online, and it had to be completed by sometime that evening. So she went downstairs during the intermission to read the question, then spent the second half of the performance thinking about how she would answer it. After the show, she went home, wrote out the answer, and posted it. All of her thinking about the quiz happened while she was managing the second half of our performance.

This is a choice that this student is making about how to approach her work.  And as an instructor, choices like this are well out of my hands.  It is hard for me to see that I could or should do anything about the (potential, anecdotal) fact that students are making choices like this these days; I'm certainly not going to change the workload of my courses.  Like all choices, it may or may not have consequences -- and this is something that people often will have to learn around this age.

[jackofallchem]

The difference between now and when I went to college (in the early 90's) is that education is less important.  Everyone prioritizes things and less important things give way to more important things.  When I was in college, schoolwork came first.  If I had a big exam, papers, or other assignment, everything else gave way.  I worked, but I told my workplace what my hours would be.  If they tried to schedule me another time, I just said "fire me".  I missed my closest cousin's wedding because it was during midterms and he understood.  Now, it is the other way around.
      I understood that I needed to get everything I could out of that short period of time because if I didn't, I would never get it.  I wanted to be in the marching band, but my advisor told me to choose my major or band.  That let me know how things were.  Many of the things I learned took hours of uninterrupted study and thinking to understand.  I can't teach my students those things anymore.  No one seems to be able to teach their students these things anymore.  That knowledge and those skills will die with my generation and be lost to future generations to their detriment. 
     When I was in college and I read about the dark ages, I didn't really understand how a lot of the classical learning could be "lost" for such a long period of time.  It was in the books.  People had the books.  Why didn't they just read them?  I didn't understand how you could have an entire population unable to understand something that was written down and accessible.  I understand now.