When Bebe's kids go to college…

For those of you that don’t know, I started grad school this semester. Because I need some $$$ help, I applied for financial aid like most folks do. Well, in grad school there are no GRANTS (read free money) only LOANS. There is also something called a Graduate Assistantship, which is alot like “work study” – monies you get to work a job on campus and the money you make pays your tuition. Even though you probably already know this, my point is that COLLEGE IS NOT FREE.
So in my assistantship gig, I help the adjunct (read part-time) professors with their classes; setting up laptop computers and video projectors, handing out papers, etc. and usually I will answer student technical questions like login passwords and where to find the applications being used, etc. so it doesn’t take time away from the whole class’ discussion/lesson. Well, this week, I had a chance to help a professor throughout a whole class. Usually I have a class during the same time I set them up and leave. Now given this was an undergrad class, and the mentality is much different than graduate level courses, I was amazed at the cavalier attitude of most of those students. The lesson was on HTML web design in Mozilla/Netscape Composer. Now I don’t teach the class, but I do use the same book in a graduate level class I am taking, so you know the week before what you will be studying. These guys were clueless.
I mean we are 2/3 into the semester and some of these guys didn’t even know the group login for the workstations. And mind you this isn’t some huge auditorium type lecture hall, this is a small 12 station computer lab with 10 students in the class. Of those 10, 4 were paying attention doing what the teacher was instructing as she was demonstrating, 1 clearly didn’t know how to do it, but kept talking to other students around her, 1 seemed to already know how to do HTML and were halfway looking paying attention, 2 were all up in facebook.com looking at profiles and answering emails and one girl was totally doing her own thing completely, not even looking at what the professor was doing or on Composer, but steady typing away. I thought wow how times have changed. I never really though discipline was an issue in college classes. I mean high school type discipline “You’re talking too loud…pay attention…classtime is for learning, not eating.” I consider myself pretty lax when it comes to rules and “the establishment” but I also use discretion; if I have to eat in class, it’s a snickers bar or some other quiet snack – not a big ol’ value meal from Burger King, I would take that outside of class after the professor finished explaining the lesson, gossip/chit chat can wait until after class – everybody has cell phones and email, it ain’t THAT important. But what really got me was that most of them didn’t know how to do it. These were CURRENT and FUTURE TEACHERS seeking licensure to teach other folks kids in public schools!!
After class I talked to the professor and she was well aware of who was paying attention and who wasn’t. She explained that it really wasn’t her problem. Students (via tuition) pay her to teach, if they don’t pay attention to get it, or ask questions, that’s on them. Which I totally agreed with. She said some students are failing and don’t even realize it. She said they don’t even try to explain why. Its understandable sometimes you fall behind, so if you get your story right, you can get some extra time to complete an assignment. But some of these kids, well 20 somethings, don’t show up for class, late work, no work, its really saddening. But then again maybe they were the ones that end up with mediocre lives and dead end jobs, in comparison to those that grasp opportunity and excel in life.