Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today | Hacker News Reader

Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today

joeydevilla.com

37 pointsr11t19 comments

I shared an apartment with three jazz musicians at one point, and I was amazed at how dedicated they all were. One of them has now become a semi-star on the Jazz scene - but it didn't come cheap. On a normal day he would get up at eight, go to school, then head straight for some training session when he finished. After a quick dinner he would go out and play one or two jobs. On weekends he played 4 or 5 jobs and did some jam sessions or did recordings.

Being a jazz musician may sound like a cozy job, but to get anywhere it takes an 80 hour work week.

Much of that 80 hour "work week" can be filled with moments of joy and neural stimulation so rich and fulfilling, that it can be fairly compared sex.

Then again, lots of being a musician involves prostituting yourself by pretending that you're enjoying playing something you think is stupid or boring.

I wonder if at least part of this phenomena cannot be explained by observer bias.

People complaining about their students are usually the ones with superior performance compared to the average student. Usually, top students become graduate students, top graduate students become professors. They are also more likely to have friends like them.

Couldn't it be that complainers were simply not aware of the extent of how bad students really were in their "good old times"?

Or maybe they were aware of it in the good old times too, and they think it was crap then too?

I have no patience for working on lame assignments, and my marks suffer, but I still have no patience for people who are in school hoping to coast through. If you don't challenge yourself, you're wasting everyone's time.

Some interesting end of semester remarks from a CS professor:

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-1...

The Postlude section is especially relevant.

Thanks for that link. His site is very interesting, the functional programming patterns especially:

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/recursion.html

This is similar to comments I've heard from profs in the CS area. It's probably cultural. We still have the students that break their backs to be the best, but the majority have been indoctrinated in this "everyone's a winner" mentality.

This behavior is at least partially derivative of the Internet startup culture of "get-rich-quick fail-fast". It does tend to breed unmerited arrogance. This too will pass. 2009 will be a great corrector of this culture.

2009 may bring some temporary respite, but the Internet startup culture is part of a larger pattern of technology startups in general, which for decades have tended to be started by young people, some of whom proceed to get far richer far faster than their age, experience, and attitude would indicate that they should.

I think it is the high influence of reality shows. And the portrayal of winner, the drama around and the gaga stories then after.

If people watch more of sports or any other shows where hardwork and performance is an absolute necessary to win, and winning is not just about people praising and talking about the winner they would shape up better i feel.

I don't thing that anything on tv is going to cure a lazy person of their laziness.

Yeah, none of the lazy people I know watch sports.

Yep, and year after year the media bleats on about how exams are getting easier because the scores are going up. The kids nowadays are going to hell in a handcart.. we've heard this since time immemorial. (Yeah, Marselis isn't the media, but still.. :))

There's a part of that which is some weird inter-generational perceptual phenomenon. There's another part of that which is the general advance of culture -- somehow kids are becoming more sophisticated at an earlier age. Scores can also go up because more people are gaming the system y hiring test tutors. However, in the US, there's another part of that which is a genuine degradation of the US public school system.

Get back to work on your businesses, fools!

Quit circle-jerking on wannabe Entrepreneur feel-good sites.

The most successful programming entrepreneurs I know didn't have time to read news sites. They were too busy getting things done.

quietly closes browser and switches to Xcode

Teachers have been complaining that students today aren't what they used to be at least since Plato -- probably even longer...

Today's universities are yesteryear's technical colleges. Universities used to produce intellectuals now they are primarily geared towards producing worker ants for modern "factories".

I'm a CS graduate. I don't consider myself a "Computer Scientist". I'm a factory worker who taps on his keyboard all day.

The fact is that a degree is now often considered the minimum qualification necessary to join the workforce.

it depends on where you go. people from one university will say they weren't taught to think, just to write code. people for a different university will say they weren't given enough hands-on experience, just computability theorems.

the real problem is that universities are marketed to kids. it's funny how the moral of many kid stories is "be yourself" and yet it seems to be taking longer and longer for people to find themselves and what they really want to do. not that the constant advertising from universities, corporations and society at large helps.

> not that the constant advertising from universities, corporations and society at large helps.

Indeed.

It also seems to me that a large part of the university experience is 'finding yourself'. Unfortunately, I don't think this process fully materializes in the vast majority of students.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com