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("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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Fourth, students may not appreciate the quality of their community college education because their high school experience was not of high quality. The quality of instruction may not have been good, the student may not have engaged seriously, or the student may not have had the skills to engage. Generally speaking, the better the high school, the better the student’s preparation to be a successful community college student---if the student applied himself or herself in high school.
Fifth, this is relevant because some students seem to believe that in college they can follow the same approach to their studies that they used in high school and be successful. They do not seem to realize that college should be more demanding and will be. One or two hours a week to prepare for a class, tests, and papers is not enough; nor is three to five enough.
These five reasons are understandable. Students do not respect their teachers because they do not know enough to do so. They can only react in a general way depending on whether they like the instructor, like the material, and enjoy the class.
Reasons for which Students Should Be Held Accountable
Student lack of respect for teachers in the classroom also shows up in ways for which students can and should be held accountable. A good half of students do not see instructors as authority figures who should be respected simply because they are the faculty. One suspects that the same students do not respect their parents as authority figures, so the teachers get no more respect than parents would, or less. Similarly, if parents set low standards for respect, teachers may get the same.
Frequently students wish to be on a first-name basis with teachers. The teacher then becomes someone who ranks only slightly higher than the students themselves. My uniform experience has been that students who wish to use my first name respect me less and expect me to behave more as a peer. That translates into my being expected not to expect as much of them and to tolerate more of the behaviors that go on between friends.
I have also found that teachers who go by first names are respected less even if the students are older. Students who are older than the teacher tend to look down on the teacher or wish to treat the teacher as a peer, as one might at a training conference. Returning adult students value their own life experience and, as a result I think, tend to see faculty members more as peers. They can be more argumentative or confrontational as well. Debate is healthy, if there is respect.
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