Rant the First

[vaznetti]

Ironically, ever since I did that rant meme, I've come up with real life subjects for ranting--my colleagues, the weather, static electricity, regular electricity, the university, the universe... well, you can see where this is going.

Anyway, se_parsons wanted to know what's wrong with kids today, and specifically, with my students.

Comments

[greenelephant]

Can't comment at length, since I'm currently scrambling to prepare for lecture, but I just wanted to say I know exactly what you mean! And even if I try to get them talking about their lives - what they watch on tv, what they did on the weekend - I get the same. stony. silence. Grr!

[alysswolf]

I should preface this by saying that I'm not a lecturer, but a librarian who has worked in an academic library for a long time. It's bad sign when you can count your experience in decades. ::grin

[vaznetti]

I find (and remember that I've only been doing this for a couple of years, so I'm still feeling my way through things) that one has to teach students how to ask questions, as well. First of all, you have to encourage them to accept that "I don't understand X" is a valid question, and that asking it will not make me think less of them. Then you have to teach them how to read the assignments and take notes, so that they see what it is that they don't understand, or what they want to know more about. My courses usually have a discussion/participation component to the grade, and I make it clear that I do expect them to have things to say, and that I want them to take risks and say things that they aren't certain about. But it takes (at minimum) a few weeks to get a class to the point where more than two or three people are willing to open their mouths.

[cschick]

Or, they've run into so many times in the classroom where they've been punished for being interesting and original that they don't care to see that college is different from high school.

Learning to parrot was a survival requirement in grammar and high school (U.S.-based student here; I graduated from HS ten years ago and from what I've heard, that has only become more important over the past decade). Sure there were teachers that wanted us to be original and creative, but they were the minority. One of the worse "outrages" I recall was receiving an F on a poetry analysis my senior year of high school in AP Lit: I wasn't overly enthused by any of the poets allowed for the analysis (because it was obvious that the teacher wanted us to select each poet's "major work" without assigning those "major works"). I took T.S. Eliot and rather than doing The Wasteland--which I'd analyzed in the past, anyhow--I analyzed poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Wow, was that a mistake. I had to do a lot of original analysis because I

[se_parsons]

I was given a B- on an A paper once for defending the teacher's provided thesis on "anti-semitism in the Merchant of Venice". I used lots of sources to back that up. I was SUPPOSED to have found there was NO anti-semitism because Jews killed Jesus and deserve to die and roast in hell.

I am not making this up, btw.

And it was in public school.

My mother raised hell and the grade was raised to the A it deserved because the grading criteria did NOT mention conclusion, it was only graded on format, which was perfect MLA style.

I feel your bullshit English teacher pain.

[cschick]

It's not just English

[vaznetti]

Stories like that make me very grateful for my high school; I can only think of one instance where I went head-to-head with a teacher with good textual evidence, and the teacher refused to back down (the fact that I still remember this and bear a grudge, many years later, is nonetheless telling).

The sad thing, of course, is that parroting is still the route to success, even in college. To be honest, students who are even engaged enough to parrot what I've said back at me score points for it; the ones that really depress me are the ones that stare straight ahead, mouth half-open, and refuse to say anything.

[zarahemla]

SO TRUE. It's all you can do to get them to keep their personalities when they come in the door. And I would have thought in a class like yours there would be a lot of active interest -- it's so specialized. Hm.

[nestra]

I understand that the collapse of the Roman republic is not more interesting than your own social life

It's totally more interesting than my social life. Sex! Intrigue! Murder! Cleopatra!