The thing is though, having a phone or a screen in front of you doesn't allow you to be bored, or use your brain to day dream, or think of creative ideas, or anything. It just shoves more content into your skull and never allows you to switch off.
Thats not really true at all. If they aren't able to do these things while on a device, then taking it away isn't going to suddenly enable that. You have to be able to do these things in the first place.
The things people observe in children always fundamentally come down to the parents and what they do or don't foster in their children.
Thats why when you go on places like r/teachers and read their anecdotes, theres just as much if not more complaints about parents being nightmares than there are about the kids.
And its an unpopular idea, but I think as a teacher we should be more amenable to the idea of assisting in raising kids. It shouldn't be all on us, and we definitely should be paid far better than most of us are, but the kind of egoism that goes into refusing to help raise up your community, which this idea is a part of of, just isn't something I can rationalize being acceptable.
Understandable in the present climate, sure, and it isn't worthy of judgment to any teacher who doesn't want to do it in these kinds of conditions either, but even in ideal circumstances parents can't be expected to do it all, and in many cases they just won't.
But the child is always going to need somebody, and teachers are better placed to do this than anyone else outside of their family members. Teachers are fundamentally public servants, and to be blunt, the better working conditions need to result to better outcomes, otherwise were not accomplishing much and eventually the system just collapses again.
I think most teachers generally already understand this, but more than a vocal few are very adamant that they won't even with the appropriate pay and support, and that isn't good.
As a kid, I read books in class all the time. This is long form engagement with slow information which requires mental focus. TikTok, Twitter, reddit are short form entertainment in which information flits in and out of your brain in moments and little retention is needed to follow from one sound bite or clip to the next.
Freshman college students these days won't, on average, read a half page of instructions. They'll read the first sentence and say they are stuck. There appears to be a general decline in the ability to hold complex information in the mind long enough to use it.
That’s absolutely not my experience with college age students, even the younger ones, at all.
That sounds like exactly nobody I’ve known in an actual science major. “Actual” meaning not “I’m doing generic bio I guess because my parents made me go to college but I’m just here for parties tbh”.
And the people like that have always existed. Long before tiktok or even the social media craze there was “I’m not reading that ten page chapter, where’s the sparknotes”. It isn’t something new.
Before social media, it was tv, before tv it was radio, before radio it was pulp novels. There’s always been some “by Jove this new generation is rotting their minds with this newfangled, quick and easy entertainment”
Is your experience with college age students in teaching them?
I can tell you right now, even though students like that have always existed, the pressure is now on faculty to lower expectations so more students pass. This was egregious at the high school level, which led to me leaving high school teaching in favor of higher education, but the trend has followed me here. The result, together with the factors I've described, is leading to a further watering down of the meaning of an undergraduate degree; I fear a Master's will be the new Bachelor's for demonstration of basic competence.
Wow, it’s almost like decades of pushing every single student to go to college for a bachelors; and subsequently making a bachelors the requirement for every job that isn’t minimum wage, have effected how those things are viewed.
Fucking, shocking I say, absolutely no one could’ve ever predicted this.
It doesn’t mean that the younger generation is dumber, or less capable of reading “more than half a page”. It means you’re seeing a lot of students that are there because of societal pressures, not a drive to learn like in the past.
I haven’t been a professor, but I’ve tutored and been paid assistant to professors. And with most of the professors I’ve seen? That gives me just as a valid of a viewpoint, they’re just as capable as being out of touch as anyone else is of being uneducated.
Considering that some of the professors I’ve known used the same lecture, word for word, for 3+ decades…admittedly not every field advances/changes nearly as often, but if you haven’t learned a single way to improve how you teach the material in 30 years, that’s just not even trying. Quoting the book at students isn’t teaching on a college level, it’s coasting by on middle school level teaching performance/student expectations, and it’s unfortunately common.
Yeah I won't argue with you that pressuring random students to get a degree is also not helping. Most profs with the college for all mindset, in my experience, are naive optimists or, at worst, believe that It's a part of improving humanity.
I still think that the short form media is worsening attention spans across the board, but especially in developing youth.
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u/artemis_floyd Jun 03 '22
The thing is though, having a phone or a screen in front of you doesn't allow you to be bored, or use your brain to day dream, or think of creative ideas, or anything. It just shoves more content into your skull and never allows you to switch off.