Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman
The quick brown fox is an endangered species.
I looked over at the other students’ lecture notes and realized they hadn’t been taught to write in cursive. A entire generation that has never packed a box with a liquor jug.
Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman
I had no idea what survey courses were until I was enrolled in one. They walk you through fundamental principles and the names of things. They are really very helpful.
When a rented textbook arrived, I flipped right through 5000 years of human history over my morning coffee. It ended in the year 1650. Was there an asteroid or something? Then I saw another book starting where the first one left off. Good!
Like most college freshmen, I know almost everything. The term “epistemology” means the study of knowledge. It isn’t easy to work epistemology in conversations but it does impress people—especially other college freshmen.
Be sure to pronounce it like this: [ē pis′tə mäl′ə jē, i-].
Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.
Some of my student friends come from countries with the highest birthrates on earth.
You’d never guess that from watching the mating rituals at our community college. They’re either invisible or they don’t exist. The birds are locked in their aviaries, the bees are in distant colonies, flirtations are checked at security. Where are the glands?
It’s a cultural thing, of course, and I’m totally blind to it. Those of us born and raised in the mainstream American culture have our own idea of what romance and courtship should look like. Even in recent decades, our millennial children have grown up with very public displays of affections from the likes of Archie, Betty and Veronica.
Census numbers don’t lie. Newcomers to our society continue to have larger than average families. There’s a whole lot of something going on here but I’m too midcentury and Middle American to recognize it.
Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.
Will this generation of young people do better than their parents?
Don’t be surprised if some students answer with a puzzled, what-outer-planet-are-you-
Their parents are working fewer hours for less money (wages are at a 65-year low). They’ve been in and out of emergency rooms, unemployment lines, bankruptcy courts. They probably didn’t finish college (sixty percent of us don’t).
There are no fairy godmothers sprinkling legacy dust on them, but these students do get help. Tuition at a community college is as low as $3000 a year. Pell grants and other federal student assistance cover most of the costs for an associate degree. The kids can get a running start. Some of the most amazing people I know were once townies.
Priti, Ali, Yourytzi, Hanna, Annam, Maria, Roger, Gentillio, Richard, Jared, Lisa, Cris, Cary, Michelle, Jonathan, Joanne, Isaac, Sang, Avril, Jonas, Hazam, Jennifer, James, Bryn, Rebecca, Jannah, Pedro, Andrea, Justin, Connelly, Aleksandrija and Hannah—yeah, they’ll will make their families proud.
Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.
There’s a place in hell, just above invading hordes and dog-fight promoters, for people who devise multiple-choice quizzes.
These tests have a reputation for being easy but the chance of a lucky guess out of five choices is a sorry 20%—five should be a legal limit.
They like to build in gotcha tricks that are quicksand for students who studied but not quite enough and abandoned streets at night for kids who memorize but don’t understand
The term “non-cumulative” didn’t mean anything to me until it was combined with “exam.” A beautiful combination of words. You get tested only on what was covered since the last test, not from the beginning of the course. If this is the “dumbing down” of American education, then dumb away.
I watch professors watching us being tested. They’re being tested too. Nobody leaves this room alive without getting a grade.
