Question for professors and educators.

[Anonymous]

Most kids don't read for pleasure the way we did. Parents of younger kids - make your kids read, even if you have to incentivize it. Keep electronics away from them at night, but give them all the books they want.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is not an easy question to answer. Admissions standards at the large private university at which I teach have definitely changed in the past couple of decades. Thus, my sample of students today is drawn from a different distribution than the sample I had twenty years ago. I suspect the same is true for at least some of the other academics posting here.

This said, I think the top end of the distribution of incoming students hasn't changed for me in the past 20 years.

I think the top students are better prepared for college today, but I don't think the average student is.

As for writing ability, top students come in with better writing abilities but not the average student. In general, students know less grammar than they did two decades ago.

And yes, students expect to be spoonfed much more so than before. For example, I got an email from a student yesterday (Saturday), asking if I could meet with her over the weekend. My Monday office hours weren't soon enough apparently! (The Monday office hours do work for her and there is no test or assignment looming.) Part of the transition to viewing universities as service providers and students as consumers who are to be kept happy.

It is sad the degree to which AP courses are being taught to the test.

I am a PP who talked about teaching soft skills. THIS is partially why! I frequently get emails from students that say things like "Hi. I need to meet with you. I can meet Tuesday at 2pm." That's it. No greeting, no signature, no clue about how to be flexible. I am not asking for rigidity, but at least something like "Hi Prof, I have some questions about the assignment. Are you able to meet with me this week to talk about it? I am free Tuesday afternoon but I can also be free other times. Thanks, Student."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I used to teach at a prestigious university in this area. Most students cared only about grades and there was a huge sense of entitlement. After every exam there would be a litany of students who would argue like lawyers before the Supreme Court about why the grade was unfair, why the exam was flawed, why the grading scheme was inappropriate, etc. There was not a shred of willingness to accept feedback for improvement that could be applied on future assignments.

This is good to know for new professor.

[Anonymous]

Well look at this site. All of the questions are about gaming the system. Paying consultants to get into better schools. Desperately asking what GPA Larla (who got into an Ivy) had.

How often (EVER?) has a DCUM parent posted: where is your child getting a great education? Are they learning a lot? Are the teachers skilled educators?

So, not big surprise that the children they raise have lost sight of the point of higher education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: I have a theory about why the quality of writing has gone down. I have a bright teenager that is incredibly well-informed regarding national and international events, politics and history. He reads all day long. However, the vast majority of his reading is on the internet. When I was his age, I read constantly, as well, but I was reading books written by great authors. I would have loved to have the immediate access to information that he has, but the quality of the writing that he is reading on a daily basis is just not the same. My kid can produce a decent paper, but he hasn’t developed an “ear” for a well-turned phrase.

In addition, teaching writing is very labor-intensive.

I came on here to say this. I had a 12th grade English teacher that would write comments all over our papers. We could resubmit them as many times as we wanted within the quarter for full credit. On occasion, I'd resubmit something 2-4 times until it was good enough for the grade I wanted. We also did timed essay exams. This was just a regular old public school in suburbia. The process of the two required analyzing sentence structure, paragraphs, and the whole composition. If I'd only had that level of writing instruction throughout, BUT I cannot imagine how much grading she did. Knowing what I know now she must have had absolutely no personal life outside of teaching. Nowadays, high school English teachers are required to have two grades per student per week. There's no way to fulfill the two pieces of writing a week obligation with 6 classes of 25 students each unless you give them separate grades for notes, outlines, topic sentences, supporting detail sentences, etc rather than just a finished essay. As a result, kids get a lot of fluff grades in high school English in order to produce grades for the grade book. It was also completely overlooked for the past twenty years as it wasn't tested in NCLB. Teachers were told not to spend time on it.

-Former public teacher