I recently finished an article posted on the Chronicle of Higher Education. My eye was first drawn to the title, “Students Are Horrible in Every Way.” I originally thought it was just some random disgruntled professor that thought it best to use the internet as his or her water cooler, but was intrigued when I noticed it was written by Paul T. Corrigan, a professor from my previous university, and just knew I had to read it. I would definitely recommend for you to take a moment and head on over to read it.
Students these days. Take it from me, I teach college. They barely read. Can’t write a coherent sentence. They have no attention span. Or respect for authority. Or for knowledge. All they do is eat, cheat, sleep, sleep around, sleep through class—texting and sexting the whole while. They are worse than all previous generations of students. Basically horrible in every way.
Let’s just say as an undergraduate student, I felt insulted after reading Corrigan’s opening statement; I mean…how could students be categorized [read: limited] by these few things? And this is exactly the point I believe he tried to make. The tongue-in-cheek title highlights a huge problem that I have personally noticed in education: expectation. The article goes on to discuss research that focuses on the “best” and “worst” college students, and introduces the idea of “kvetching.”
According to Corrigan, “Kvetching happens when teachers, shaking their heads literally or figuratively, tell one another in private about instances when their students acted in ways the teachers wish they did not.” Let’s face it–we’re a gossipy society. We talk about one another and absolutely love it. It’s not always a bad thing (even when we’re complaining); granted, it’s not inherently good either. I personally need to complain once in a while. I once had an employer ask me in an interview about how they and their prostaff could help me if I ever got stressed out. My response? Take me to the side, lend an ear, and just let me vent, rather, kvetch it out and I’d be good. I was hired and only got real stressed out once during my second week on the job. I got to vent for about a minute and never had a problem for the rest of my time there. I’m not saying that venting/complaining is always the answer, but sometimes people just need an ear. We are all human and want to be heard. I agree with Corrigan in that kvetching, even when it doesn’t evolve into full on student-bashing, could possibly create a toxic environment if not tamed with constructive conversations.
The entire article is a call for clarification and self-reflection as a college professor. The comment section is filled with contrasting views from educators all across the country. They mention possibilities such as the difference in kvetching from R1 schools (big research institutions) to small liberal arts schools, to students of various backgrounds, to the cause of kvetching from high vs. low expectations set by the teacher. One user, Conred Maddox, is one of the few people that seemed to do exactly as the article suggests. He clearly points out problems that he sees and then solutions seem fairly obvious.
As a student, I witness kvetching (of all levels) in both the student body, faculty/staff, and even community members. I want to be the one, right here, right now, to say, “Hey, we can hear you!” and to also apologize for any unjust kvetching from myself and fellow students. As you may already know, I went to
Southeastern University, a small private Christian school in central Florida, for two years before transferring to Stony Brook University, a Research 1 institution. I can say that student kvetching is quite the same at both places. One comment on the original article mentioned a teacher’s experience of how they perceived expectation vs. reality. At one point in their career, they thought students were just much worse than any they had ever had. After looking at the true data, however, this teacher realized that these students were right on course with every other class’s academic success–the problem was that the teacher had become tired and burned out. As a flutist, I often see this trend in my practicing. The only solution that I’ve found that works is to take a step back and re-examine what it is that I’m doing. I’m not getting any worse at practicing per se, just bored and desensitized to the whole ordeal.
All of these examples seem to point in every direction, and I admit that I was confused a bit when first reading Corrigan’s article and the subsequent comments. Bottom line is that 1) a blog post or two (or 27) cannot solve the issues of kvetching, or expectation vs. reality, and 2) it’s not solely the duty of the faculty or students to come up with an answer. We can easily kvetch and say that many faculty don’t earnestly care for their students and aren’t willing to put in the extra hours to learn how to teach, and that many students would rather sext all day or watch Netflix. Common sense shows that many students and professors (at both small and large universities) work very hard to pursue more knowledge and would feign at the idea of being generalized into groups that would sext or student-bash at the water cooler– it also means that there’s no way to categorize people into molds.
Once we start expecting certain things from our students, professors, administrators, etc. we run into problems of “labeling.” We limit these people by our own close-mindedness. An interesting aspect to studying music history is to think about 16th-century people as the same as they are today. Of course society is incredibly different, but people were people all the same. I feel that this sort of disconnect happens between students and professors. At times, each group may forget that there’s only a few years difference between their ages. I challenge everyone to take a step back, and really think about why we do things, and how we can improve. I plan for this to be a common theme in my blog as I love trying to figure out what drives the crazy things that I do!
Good luck and all the best. I hope you would comment below with your own thoughts, suggestions, or questions. Discussion is really the best way to flesh these things out. There are plenty of things that I’d love to have said in this article, but can’t for purely matters of space.