Guest lecturer perspective: modern students are absolutely atrocious

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sounds like you really needed to vent. That’s interesting and sad about the difference in students. My 8 yo gets really frustrated that entitled classmates won’t listen to the teachers and then their parents blame the teachers for yelling. Certainly they will not win teacher of the year, but my DC and I do feel sorry for those scapegoated teachers.

Same and I have an 8 year old too. She’s been talking about her teacher crying a lot and kids in the class aren’t listening. It is a bit like lord of the flies when I visit. They recently assigned her class a teachers aide.

But my other kid is in PreK and I volunteer often. The kids sit like angels and they have much better attention spans. They love to be read to. These preK kids weren’t affected by Covid because they were babies. And they haven’t yet been assigned their school chrome book. I hate that all the kids get laptops in public school. The PreK is private so maybe that’s a factor too?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I was at a nightclub last weekend, my first time in years. The DJ wouldn't play full songs. He'd play 30-60 seconds of a song, then move to another, then revisit another part of that song later that evening. All I can guess is this is for the Tiktok generation that has a short attention span.

Also notice most songs these days start into the lyrics in the first 10 seconds, again I think due to attention spans. A song like U2's With or Without You would never be a hit today.

They would never play a long intro in a nightclub. And djs have been mixing songs like that for decades.

[Anonymous]

Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.

Attention span have been decreasing over time. There are many ways to see this, beyond anecdotal stories that you can ignore. Take a look at movies by decade, they used to be slower. Take a look at books by decade and century. Sentences used to be longer, books used to read slower and are more fast paced now, read more quickly now. Students read excerpts in class now rather than books, not to save money but because they cannot read a whole book anymore. Etc.

Maybe there are tradeoffs, benefits no fast switching to offset the loss of attention. Maybe? Or maybe we're just destroying ourselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.

Ancient Greeks and generations of students were not raised on Tiktok their entire lives until the 2010s. They're literally training peoples' brains from the womb now to have ADD. If you can't get to a punchline in 2.5 seconds they zone out. Heaven forbid you have to teach extremely complex topics like quantum physics, law, or some other thing that will require intense focused thought.

It's truly disturbing how much students seemed dumbed down, disinterested, and disengaged. 10 years ago when I gave the same talk I would be inundated with questions afterwards and hounded by students hungry for answers to questions after the lecture. Yesterday, almost zero questions after the lecture, and they clearly all wanted to peace out because sitting in a spot for 75 minutes is too much for them now. Students 10 years ago and even as late as 2018-2019 didn't have the same issues. I also laugh to myself, because who is dumb enough to pay $80k or whatever the tuition is only to go to class with your headphones on the whole time? Way to waste your money.

The US is doomed if this is the quality of our worker pool in the near future. Absolutely terrible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What grade? I teach kindergarten and so many kids are brain damaged from too much technology. Their eyes can barely focus on a picture in a book or on words. They haven't been able to watch a short animated movie for many years.

It was a college course.

Did you lecture pertain to anything they would be graded on or have anything to do with real world application of their degrees? If not, then they were using their time during your lecture timely

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.

Attention span have been decreasing over time. There are many ways to see this, beyond anecdotal stories that you can ignore. Take a look at movies by decade, they used to be slower. Take a look at books by decade and century. Sentences used to be longer, books used to read slower and are more fast paced now, read more quickly now. Students read excerpts in class now rather than books, not to save money but because they cannot read a whole book anymore. Etc.

Maybe there are tradeoffs, benefits no fast switching to offset the loss of attention. Maybe? Or maybe we're just destroying ourselves.

Your rant sounds familiar' "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise." That was from Socrates

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What grade? I teach kindergarten and so many kids are brain damaged from too much technology. Their eyes can barely focus on a picture in a book or on words. They haven't been able to watch a short animated movie for many years.

It was a college course.

Did you lecture pertain to anything they would be graded on or have anything to do with real world application of their degrees? If not, then they were using their time during your lecture timely

This doesn't even make sense. Seems like you lost your focus halfway through this thought and couldn't even finish it. OP is exactly right, and you're a prime example.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What grade? I teach kindergarten and so many kids are brain damaged from too much technology. Their eyes can barely focus on a picture in a book or on words. They haven't been able to watch a short animated movie for many years.

It was a college course.

Did you lecture pertain to anything they would be graded on or have anything to do with real world application of their degrees? If not, then they were using their time during your lecture timely

Yes, I often come in to talk about translational medicine and how you go about getting biotech ideas tested and approved. Mind you this is an audience of students who are biotech majors and who supposedly want to work in biotech or start biotech companies. They completely tuned out advice from a professional in biotech who's been doing it for over 20 years. I'd never hire grads like these. Just horrible. Students 10 years ago had zero issues paying attention because they knew the direct relevance of the talk to their careers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What grade? I teach kindergarten and so many kids are brain damaged from too much technology. Their eyes can barely focus on a picture in a book or on words. They haven't been able to watch a short animated movie for many years.

It was a college course.

Did you lecture pertain to anything they would be graded on or have anything to do with real world application of their degrees? If not, then they were using their time during your lecture timely

That's sad. What about learning for the sake of learning? If not at university, then when? I've also noticed an increase in them asking what exactly is on the test because they want to study that, and not a bit more.

[Anonymous]

My smart college freshman is kind of like this, and it really bothers me.

I look at the way they do google searches when they want to research something, and it's awful. They read too quickly, and if the answer doesn't jump out at them in 5 seconds, they move on.

I've told them repeatedly to slow down.

Even the way both my kids click on stuff is too quick and impatient, and they make mistakes. I'm fast on the keyboard but accurate; they are fast, too, but not as accurate.

I'm a pretty impatient person and read quickly, too, but DC is way worse and misses things.

Having stated that, I think a lot of these students are immature, and they may become more curious about the world outside what's in front of their face as they get older.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.

Sometimes there's truth to it. I was reading a book from the late 1800's and it was so boring. Three pages describing the scenery and two pages about the mental state of a side character. That book would never get published today. And maybe that's not a bad thing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Was just talking to another professor today about how the students barely have enough attention span to read a paragraph. Excerpted readings are getting shorter and shorter. They claim they don't understand all the words and don't bother to look them up in the dictionary. It's bad.

Tech and social media is dumbing every generation down at an exponential rate. I seriously wonder if student 10 years from now will even be capable of reading anymore.

M. T. Anderson's book Feed was disturbingly prescient in this regard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.

Sometimes there's truth to it. I was reading a book from the late 1800's and it was so boring. Three pages describing the scenery and two pages about the mental state of a side character. That book would never get published today. And maybe that's not a bad thing?

Being interested in that much detail was a hallmark of print culture, and print culture definitely had it's benefits. I guess you'd have to read "Orality and Literacy" (which I admit to not having read) to find out if there were drawbacks. TV/social media has returned our culture to an oral one, though admittedly one with a much bigger reach for speech than the ancients or medieval folks had.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.

Yes there is. When they worried in ancient Greece that writing would lead to people no longer memorizing the entire Illiad, they weren't wrong about that. I doubt there's been a human being alive in centuries, maybe even millenia, who has memorized the Illiad, but the Greeks used to do it. What the ancient Greeks could not have forseen was the positive benefits of writing for other things would (I think) outweigh the loss of that much memorization.

Will social media culture have benefits that are equivalent to writing? It...sure doesn't seem like it.