Snowflakes falling.... all over themselves
- Peter Lorenzi
- May 17, 2022
- 5 min read
May 17, 2022. "My college students are not OK," claims first-year writing professor Jonathan Malesic. Below see his opening and closing paragraphs of his New York Times' op-ed.
Note (per the Times): Mr. Malesic is the author of “The End of Burnout.” He teaches first-year writing at Southern Methodist University and lives in Dallas.
In my classes last fall, a third of the students were missing nearly every time, and usually not the same third. Students buried their faces in their laptop screens and let my questions hang in the air unanswered. My classes were small, with nowhere to hide, yet some students openly slept through them.
I was teaching writing at two very different universities: one private and wealthy, its lush lawns surrounded by towering fraternity and sorority houses; the other public, with a diverse array of strivers milling about its largely brutalist campus. The problems in my classrooms, though, were the same. Students just weren’t doing what it takes to learn.
By several measures — attendance, late assignments, quality of in-class discussion — they performed worse than any students I had encountered in two decades of teaching. They didn’t even seem to be trying. At the private school, I required individual meetings to discuss their research paper drafts; only six of 14 showed up. Usually, they all do.
I wondered if it was me, if I was washed up. But when I posted about this on Facebook, more than a dozen friends teaching at institutions across the country gave similar reports. Last month, The Chronicle of Higher Education received comments from more than 100 college instructors about their classes. They, too, reported poor attendance, little discussion, missing homework and failed exams.
*****
Professors must recognize that caring for students means wanting to see them thrive. That entails high expectations and a willingness to help students exceed them. Administrators will need to enact policies that put relationships at the center. That will mean resisting the temptation to expand remote learning, even if students demand it, and ensuring that faculty workloads leave time for individual attention to students.
“Young people are the hope of the world,” Dr. Crider told me. Current students, he added, “are capable of rising to the same standards as before, and we do them a disservice when we presume they’re too mentally ill or too traumatized to function.”
A mantra of teaching, at any level, is “Meet the students where they are.” But if education is built on relationships, then colleges must equally insist students meet their teachers where they are. The classroom, the lab and the office are where we instructors do our best and where a vast majority of students can do their best, too. Our goal is to take students somewhere far beyond where they meet us.
Here is my take:
I don't want to invoke my dad's, "Kids today....," claim but after fifty years on the college campus, including the 'turbulent' Sixties I feel confident that when it comes to campus climate change, we are at a fifty-year low. Low in terms of the effectiveness of American higher ed at producing productive, educated, skilled graduates, ready to make a significant contribution to society, at least as significant as the investment we have made in them.
Using attendance as a measure of motivation better represents faculty ego, much more than faculty effectiveness. Attendance at Gaby's UCLA lectures pre-pandemic was never impressive, often surprisingly bad. I have seen no indication that attendance rates at large lectures has anything to do with student performance in the course. I think that faculty over estimate the value-added element of their lectures; many are most interested in having an audience. These are the same ones who relish the last exam exting comment, "I really enjoyed your class." Even when I was a doctoral student at Penn State, one low-scoring (on his evaluations) prof posted research on how most of the evaluations were based on theatrical performance, not quality of the classroom educational experience, and that students were just as happy to listen to entertaining gibberish -- and it is much worse now, with Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. -- than to really learn something in class.
[NOTE: All of my academic peers, readers of this missive can safely accept, "present company not included."] Brother Mark, teaching high school physics in a good, highly diverse suburban DC school, acknowledges in his first year that students are distracted, bored, uninterested, etc. and he has only taught during the pandemic.
As Tom Scheye used to quip, every year faculty would claim that "morale is at an all-time low," and that was about the faculty. In my experience, I felt comfortable saying that especially in my last ten years at Loyola, student preparation, attention and test performance hit an all-time low with each succeeding entering class, as Loyola and most colleges surrendered to the anti-test bias, the diversity police, the social do gooders, the entitled students, and their own core values in exchange for a self-serving, virtue-signaling smugness about college as a grand social experiment and equity equalizer and an enormous institution with a very big appetite for growth in revenue via added enrollment, revenue directed primarily at feeding the social experiment and lining the pockets of a bloated, overpaid, unnecessary and dysfunctional, politically correct, spineless administration writing meaningless and downright silly vision and mission statements, and asking their peers to acknowledge their profound 'goodness' -- the goodness of the administrators, even more than the "goodness' of the mission. The pandemic, George Floyd and a senile American president controlled by spineless university presidents and idiotic progressive elites only accelerated all of this decline, both in education and in the economy.
Side note: A local school's Title 9 administrator has filed charges against some eighth grade kids for not using "preferred pronouns" in addressing a student who demanded to addressed as "they" rather than he or she, labeling their behavior as sexual harassment.
https://www.seehafernews.com/2022/05/13/kiel-middle-school-students-charged-with-sexual-harassment-over-misuse-of-pronouns/ See another report, here. And for 'malicious misgendering,' see here.
All these damaged snowflakes are entering the world of work, a world for which they lack many of the basic skills and knowledge to continue to learn and to contribute to a business or to society. Instead of making a productive, independent contribution, they are falling back on their parents in increasing numbers (full article linked below):
Many adult children are returning home lately because they need help. Some adult children have addiction or mental-health disorders, while others are emotionally and financially distressed after a divorce, broken relationship or job loss.
The pandemic accelerated the trend of adult children living at home. In 2021, close to one-third of adults aged 18 to 34 lived with their parents—which would include those in the younger age range who came home when campuses moved to remote learning—up from 27% in 2005, according to U.S. Census figures.
Way too many college graduates today are imbued with countless rights and sense of entitlement that used to be reserved for crotchedly elderly complaining about their meager social security benefits. Colleges are deluding themselves and lying to parents. College students are looking at four years of unsupervised -- per the Hank Hilton thesis -- sex, drugs and alcohol (rock and roll is dead, mind you). Employers are trying to balance their shareholder responsibilities with an unwarranted and unsustainable ESG ethos. Even with $200,000 salaries, Was-mart can't find enough skilled, college graduates who can manage a retail operation:
The only real question left is: How far can we go before we fall into the chasm, unable to climb out of the abyss? Or, put another way, "Is it too late?"
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