Comment by nicbou
20 days ago
I'm in my thirties. I remember most of these things being true a decade ago. Engineers in training failed the your/you're test. Some people read, but most people did not. We forget that the same ignorance is the norm among people our age because our paths with those people have split years ago. A lot of the behavioural complaints at the end of this post could have been made about me. I didn't have enough time to care about all the things that were forced down my throat. They seemed pointless anyway. I had mandatory French and photography classes to become a software engineer. I'd have enjoyed those if I wasn't working night shifts at a petrol station to pay for them.
It's important to remember that those are very young people, right out of high school. We expect then to have skills they're likely not honing in a no-child-left-behind environment. Above all we expect them to understand the importance of all this, even though they have little to no experience as adults.
Perhaps we're just slowly turning into boomers, shaking our fist at "kids these days".
> I'm in my thirties. I remember most of these things being true a decade ago.
The author has been a professor and teaching for over 30 years. Presumably he would not be writing this if the type and scale of the problem hadn't changed in that time.
Could it be that the author changed as a person, sees the past with rose-tinted glasses, or fails to recognise that the context changed in the last 30 years?
That seems less likely. What would motivate that change?
Matriculating into college with a phone addiction is akin to starting off with executive functioning impairments. I was in college 20 years ago and was probably addicted to the Internet, but I didn't have wifi and a laptop with me at all times, so it wasn't ubiquitous, the way phones are now.
Yeah, I have an arts degree and twenty years ago I know there was chronic absenteeism in sociology classes because I was chronically absent in sociology. I also couldn't do all the readings each week because I had both homework and other readings and so I had to be strategic, especially when I needed to start my own readings for all the papers I had to write. It's possible this poor professor's readings end up on people's ignore pile.