On Thursday I will put a summer of research and writing behind me and return to my professorial duties in the classroom. When I do, I will greet a fresh crop of college students, as I have done every year since 1999.
I often get asked if I notice any difference, if students have gotten “better” or “worse” over the years since I first began of teaching. The question itself can often be a bit loaded; the person posing it may expect my answer to confirm their suspicions. The truth, however, is a little more complex, which is why I often answer: “Both.” It seems to me that as time goes by, the students entering my classroom, on the whole, are getting better at some things and worse at others.
My home institution, Towson University in suburban Baltimore, is a good place to observe such trends and vacillations among American college students. In many ways it is a middling institution. That is not to degrade the school, but rather to point out that in some respects it is representative of the larger American population, or at least the minority of Americans who wind up attending college.
TU is not a top tier school chock full of super achievers or a private school teeming with rich kids. But then again, Towson is not a community college where demographics trend more towards poverty. The vast majority of its 22,000 students come from middle class families that range from almost poor to almost rich. A fair number will be the first or one of the first in their family to go graduate college. Many of them work at least part time. And while the clear majority of students are white suburbanites, there is a rising minority enrollment, and a steady population of both rural and urban students.
Anywhere from 200-250 of these students will filter through my classes in a given academic year, with a good mix of History majors and non-History majors alike. In my experience with the thousands of Towson students I’ve taught and advised during my ten years there, I find that they generally run the full gamut when it comes to issues like talent, preparation, and work habits. My grades often end up approximating a bell curve, not because I grade on one, but because that’s just the way things tend to sort themselves out at a place like Towson.
In other words, Towson University offers a reasonable cross-section of Northeastern American college students. And so when someone asks me whether students are getting better or worse, I feel reasonably comfortable saying “both.”
One area in which I find students have improved noticeably over the years (some colleagues will no doubt disagree) is in their writing. Their formal grammar is still problematic, their spelling’s no better, and as young adults of course they’re still prone to misusing the passive voice and big words they don’t really understand in an effort to sound smart. And lord knows their handwriting is worse than ever, making their essay-filled blue books a nightmare in some respects. However, their ability to cobble together a clear thought and to organize some of those thoughts, I believe, is getting better.
I attribute that to their having grown up with the internet. They simply write a lot more than prior generations of students. And certainly all of them, just like all of us, have had that unpleasant experience of sending an email or text that was meant to be ironic or sarcastic but is taken the wrong way, or for some other reason there is a fundamental miscommunication with you and the reader and difficulties ensue. It can be a painful lesson in the need to write clearly and the importance of knowing your audience, and a lot of them have already learned it by the time they get to my class.
Another way in which they’re better is that they are, for lack of a better word, far more post-modern than earlier generations of students. They did not grow up in Cold War America, with its emphasis on rigid categories or its harsh and sometimes moralistic critiques (or dogmatic defenses) of the fringe. And in addition to a post-Cold War America, they also grew up in a post-Civil Rights America, a place where bigotry, while it still certainly exists, is no longer acceptable in the mainstream popular culture, while diversity is a nearly universally lauded world view.
In short, they don’t remember the 1980s. Actually, they weren’t even born yet. Thursday’s new freshman will have entered this world in 1993. So they don’t even really remember the 1990s.
The result is that today’s students are far more comfortable simply accepting an idea, person, or thing for what it is. They have less of a need to pigeon hole and presume. When confronted with a round peg and a square hole, they are less likely to try and jam the peg in, or failing that, to then blame it, judge it, and cast it out. And I think that is to their credit.
Simply put, they’re much more open-minded than my generation was at their age. Disco or Rock n Roll? Many of them instinctively recognize that kind of nonsense as a false dichotomy. Why on earth should one feel compelled to choose? The notion that either genre represents some murky value system that demands our loyalty is ridiculous, and they would have no compunction about liking The Village People and Led Zeppelin.
Personally, I’ll take “Macho Man” over “Stairway to Heaven” any day.
But recent students also have their weaknesses and blind spots. And one of the they ways in which they can frustrate faculty and undermine their own performance and development has to do with LEGOS.
Yes, LEGOS, that classic toy of colorful, plastic, interlocking blocks invented by a Danish carpenter. And we’ll talk about that in the next post.