("It's a Lack of Respect", She Replied. -- continued)
“Entitlement” is the key word. There seems to be a consensus that today’s student generation has a strong sense of entitlement. These students clearly placed their own immediate personal or social needs ahead of the group’s larger needs. They did not respect the instructor or other students enough to forego meeting their own needs. If they got a C instead of a B, what difference would it make? If they got a C-, the grade would not transfer. About that they cared, but they believed it would not happen to them. It did.
It has also been suggested that today’s students need the “stim” they get from their cellphones, texts, and interactions, something like an addiction, and that their attention spans are noticeably shorter. All that would be relevant but should not be overriding in the classroom.
It is worth noting that with two possible exceptions, in different sections, these students were not good students academically. They did not follow instructions, or save the handouts needed for essays, or consistently read the assignments. In many cases I found that I was making the same corrections on the last paper that I made on the first one. These students did not seem, for the most part, to have any academic sense of purpose. I sometimes wondered why they were there. From this perspective, there appears to be a larger context.
Understandable Reasons for Disrespect to Faculty
Lack of respect from students shows up in understandable ways. Most community college students do not know their instructors’ academic credentials. It is not certain whether students would appreciate or value the credentials, even if they were known. Generally students do not have the background to appreciate the effective difference between one set of degrees and another.
Second, there is real doubt that most community college students truly appreciate the quality of the education they are being given in any particular class. They have no experience to tell them whether they are being taught more, the same, or less than they would be taught at the four-year college across town. They do have a general sense, such as “We’re not learning much,” but not a sense of relative quality.
They evaluate a class more in terms of whether they like the instructor or enjoy the class. Some, assuredly, do say, “I learned a lot in that class,” but they cannot measure it.
Third, if students are the first generation in their family to go to college, there may be no college tradition against which to measure the value of what they are getting.
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