Dear Millenials: Your Parents Lied to You
toughsledding.wordpress.com
toughsledding.wordpress.com
The second way this is funny, is just imagining young PR flacks crying because their papers were graded badly. That just warms up my heart. I mean the thought that a human being would be so depraved (or is forced by the economy into such a depraved condition) as to dream about being a PR person when they grow up is rather depressing. But thinking of them suffering along the way is a bit of a bright spot.
Unfortunately, the whole thing was written by a PR professor so I just don't believe it. He is probably just exaggerating in order to establish some cred for himself as a tough no-nonsense professor and also to create the idea that PR is a rigorous field of study.
The best classes were usually taught by strict professors with the confidence to stick up for their original lesson plan.
Communications, sports medicine, all these majors attract a disproportionate amount of slackers BECAUSE they are easy. The only reason the hard sciences are not AS BAD is because the subject matter makes it much harder to dumb down.
sod off, racist
That's shifted a good five or ten years back from what I thought. I was born in '82; my parents are Boomers. I thought that made me Generation X.
I. . . I don't want to be a Millenial.
We had AIM in high school, Facebook in (some of) college, and MTV had already mostly stopped playing music videos when we became aware of it.
Sorry dude, you're very much a Millenial.
No? You're not generation X, sorry.
I was born in 1980, but I had 2 older brothers and I was heavily involved in their social circles. MacGyver and the A-Team were the stuff of my generation. I always felt like my younger sisters were weird; Power Rangers was a show of their generation. I would consider myself at the tail end of Gen X.
My wife was born in 1982, watched Power Rangers, and doesn't remember the fall of the Soviet Union... but also grew up using UNIX, remembers Vinyl, owned a Walkman as a teen, and feels most socially comfortable with people in the 35-50 age bracket (who often assume she's in her late 30s.) I'd say she's more Gen X than Millennial.
Another close friend of mine was born in 1981, and I'd consider him 100% Millennial.
Invariably, if I got a teacher/prof who bled all over my creations, I'd start with B-s at the beginning and end up with As by the end. I didn't improve my writing. I just figured out the teachers pet peeves and learned to work around them. My teachers were invariably smarter and more experienced than me when dealing with the subject at hand, but that doesn't prevent them from being flesh-and-blood people with idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies.
I'd love to believe I'm just a millenial who could stand to learn at lot from an ego-crushing set of experiences, but just because a person hurts your feelings doesn't make them a better teacher.
I too had my ego bruised and spirits crushed by hard-marking, discipline demanding examiners. In each case, they're the only the ones I remember. All the wishy-washy as-long-as-you-tried ones are as forgotten as they were useless to my learning.
Half the battle in teaching young people is making them realise the scope of the things they don't know, so they can appreciate how far they have to travel. Call me old-school, but I don't see how you can do this without brusing a few egos and crushing a few spirits. It's precisely the ego that says 'this is good enough, I'll submit that'.
To my point above, the vindictive teachers were not necessarily the most insightful, and they were not the ones who deflated my ego. The comments that hurt were the terse ones that showed both that they clearly understood what I was trying to say, and that I was wrong. Pointing out a logical inconsistency in my argument in a polite way is a much less abrasive and much more effective way of teaching.
Perhaps I should say that a students ego often gets in the way of producing increasingly better work, but being a dick to them isn't always the answer.
And I would agree with you there. As long as the point is driven home that the work is below par, and the reasons why, without any fancy wrapping or ego-massaging. Being direct without being a dick, though there are plenty of people who don't know how to do one without being the other.
I'm still appreciative to a Grade 8 maths teacher who humiliated me in front of the class for slacking off during the semester and letting grades slip. Because I sure worked hard to prove him wrong next time. I don't know if there would have been any other way to get through to me at that time.
Or the "Beat you till you cry" parents of the generation before.
Or the "Off to the factory, brat" parents, etc.
Our culture is obsessed with degrees-- not learning. Because of this the education system doesn't let teachers actually do their job. In elementary and high school it's truly unconscionable how students pass from grade to grade. By the time they get to college it's way too late. Tenured hard-ass professors are the only people who can get away with it-- but if you think you can flunk half your students and still make tenure you're delusional. Incentives are completely misaligned. Make no mistake, Education Inc. exists to further the institution, not the student.
Then again, I've been told I'm too critical quite a bit.
Also, I don't understand the part about said kids having had "adult responsibilities" - wouldn't that create the opposite kind of person, one who can take failure? Perhaps it was ironic.
Bypass it all be creating alternatives like this:
khanacademy.org
This kind-of-thing is the future regardless.
Problem solved.
He's one of the few that "survived" all that bullshit and is doing it how it should be done.