This won't be a long diary. I wanted to put it up quickly before I head out this morning to meet up with some students at a community event. We'll be out planting trees, etc.
My goal in this diary is to see what, if any, stories people have to share about some of the cultural norms developing in education.
In today's New York Times Bob Herbert wrote a piece called "College the Easy Way." I don't want to get into the entire editorial, but here is the link for you to read if you're interested.
College the Easy Way
Herbert makes a few good points, but I'd like to highlight one paragraph:
Intellectual effort and academic rigor, in the minds of many of the nation’s college students, is becoming increasingly less important. According to the authors, Professors Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia: “Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”
As somebody who teaches HS, I have some students who fit this behaviorial type laid out by Herbert, but many who don't.
I'm really throwing this out to the folks here to see where you own views lie on this. If you teach, do you have a lot of students who have attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are not a good fit for academic commitment? If you're a parent, do your kids or their classmates fit into what Herbert discusses?
Like almost any other teacher, I teach my share of slackers. What I really can't say that I have a lot of students who expect good grades for doing little work. Maybe I'm lucky. Maybe I have a better set of human beings that the poor women from Bucks County PA who needed to blog/vent about her students.
In either case, I really want to here what y'all have to say on this topic. I'll be back later to check out anything that you folks have to say.