Students these days! I mean really!!! See how easily we all turn into curmudgeons. :)

But seriously, I had a student today who told me that he could only find the abstract of a book. Me: huh? Student: it's not online. Me: Hello. Have you heard of the library, dude? Student: You mean I need to go to the library to do research? Me: Ya think?

Sheesh!

jwb

I regularly have students in my upper-level classes who tell me that mine is the first course that has made them actually enter the library. I have to set aside a day to teach them how to use the library catalog and how to find periodical articles, because they have no idea. To their credit, at least they're (usually) pleased to discover these things, rather than feeling unduly burdened. But still.

These stories never cease to amaze me. None of us would have said something so blatantly asinine as that to one of our instructors when I was in college 15 years ago. Different times though...I guess...and a different set of kids.

Yeah, that boy needs killing. Where I live that would stand as a legitimate defense in court. "He needed killin'." Usually it isn't used in this sort of situation, but I think it could apply. You just need to bring him on a roadtrip to Texas before killing him.

Oh. My. GOD.

It's a good thing no one said that to me today, they wouldn't have made it out of the room in one piece.

I may have to kill him.

Can I help? :) Kids these days. And I say that as if I'm a crusty, old geezer.

These kids!!! Is this a student who makes relatively good grades?

I had this same reaction the other day...and I was venting to a colleague in much the same fashion.

He became red-faced and said to me: gee, don't you think it's our job to teach them what research is too. Get used to it" and he walked away.

Fucker.

Hey now! It's not all kids these days. I would never say something like that to a professor. The rescue workers that retrieved my body from the library after a month or two would have to be the ones to suggest that maybe the assignment was a bit out of hand.

Since my state was one of the model for the No Child Left Behind's standardized tests.. I'd say it's only gonna get worse. My first two years of high school were spent training on how to pass a test that a chimp could be trained to prepare for. Nothing quite like dumbing everyone down to the lowest common denominator and then pushing them out into the jet stream. Even that's no excuse for bad manners though.

Little fucker. If you kill him, can we help?

Seriously though, that's a pretty typical attitude: "You mean we have to do work outside of class?"

Forpetesake.

I know this guy. He's the same one who said to me last semester:

Him: Excuse me, but do we have an exam next Thursday?
Me: Yes. As stated in the syllabus.....
Him: Well, you havent mentioned anything test-related lately so I was wondering if we were still having it.
Me: Really? Hmmm... nothing test related? Not 3 hours a week of lecture/discussion? Not countless material on WebCt? Not 84,000 emails back and forth? Cant think of one thing??
Him: Well.. you didnt remind us.
Me: Well... that's what the SYLLABUS IS FOR. It tells you what days things will happen. So you can plan.

For the record... I DID, of course, mention it. Fuckers. Nearly all of them.

Um, hello, Stupid College Student--FIRST GRADERS have that much homework nowadays! WTF is he thinking?
Kill him? Hell no, you just may have to FLUNK him. Oy.

High school my ass, I was doing library skills in 4th grade! Course, schools were better then...
It isn't ALL students; just the ones who've never had to work for anything (at school OR at home).

I'm sure your fellow profs and most of the students would give you a hearty round of applause if you did.

I wonder if your univ has a decription of what's expected for credit hours written somewhere? I used to get immense pleasure out of pointint out to my students that according to Little Red U they were supposed to work X hours outside of class for every 1 hour in class (at little red u for ugrads, I think it was 1 hour per hour and for grads it was 2 hours per hour in class. At my alma mater, for grads it was 3 hours out for every hour in.) It's great when you can show them in the course bulletin or similar that they are officially just being big whiny babies!

And fellow students in my class wonder why I'm honors and they aren't... Um... STOP PARTYING IDIOTS!

UGH. I'm up at 6:30 am to be there when the doors open and they wander in last minute and expect me to help them? UM.. NO.

don't worry, profs are the only ones frustrated... and to think I have to compete against these idiots in a year for a job. GRRRRRRRR....

It's the contemptuousness that's the real kicker.

kids. just want everything spoonfed don't they.

You know, this is where I wish we could be issued stamps that say something like "A waste of oxygen" and stamp them on our student's forehead.

In honor of what Ancarett just said.. here's those stamps. Alright so it looks like only two are applicable but you get the idea.

Good God, what is wrong with students? I personally think kids should work for a few years before going to college because they really aren't mature enough for it.

In law school, the two major companies who create and maintain massive research databases do their best to get us hooked on it so that as lawyers, we pay thousands of dollars each month to do research online because we don't know how to do paper research in the library. My legal writing professor says that the number one complaint attorneys in the real world have is that new attorneys don't know how to research offline. The legal writing profs don't do much to remedy that though; I think law schools benefit quite a bit from the support of the online database companies and push for the professors to push it.

What surprises me about your horror-student stories is that these people are around the same age as me, and I can't think of anything in my pre-college education that encouraged me to be lazy and pathetic. Even though I relied mostly on online sociological research databases all through college, I knew exactly where the paper copies of the journals were located in the school library and how to get a copy of the journals that our school didn't keep paper copies of.

I always complain about too much work privately, if I feel like we're getting to that point in the class (and I am NOT a lazy student, more of the overachieving type). You'd think that common sense would dictate that you don't complain to the person who's deciding your grade, right?

*stomp* I deserve an A! I'm cute! *twirls hair around finger*

I'm giving my class the second exam of the semester is next Tuesday. This is a class of ~150. On test 1 I gave the students 40 multiple choice questions (2 points each) and two short answer questions (10 points each). At the end of class on Thursday, a student came to me and asked if there would be short answer questions on test 2 as well. I told her I hadn't written the test yet but it was quite possible.

She said she hoped I wouldn't do so because, "those questions, ..., I mean,....they....."

I interjected, "Make you think?".

"Yeah!", she said, as if I had provided her with the perfect argument against including such questions.

I post all of the slides I use in class, but I get complaints if they are not posted in advance (because *gasp* without the slides they might actually have to take notes!)

I hand out review questions for the exams. Someone asked me if they were going to have to answer them on their own, or if I would be handing out an answer sheet. These are essay questions, by the way.

How did college suddenly become kindergarten in the last 10 years?

Hi-
You need to start watching Bernie Mac and getting some of his lines such as "bust his head 'til the white meat shows." Sound like that boy needs some old schoolin'. The pity is, that student will probably be a senator in 20 years.

One school I taught at had a space on its evaluation forms for students to indicate the amount of time they spent out of class on work for said class. I had two students one term who checked "more than 12 hours." Now mind you, this was a 4th-rate commuter campus of a state school, and most of my students had full-time jobs and family responsibilities, so I kept the reading light. We spent about a week and a half per book-- and it was a children's lit class (talk about having people sign up for your course because they think it's going to be easy!). It's been almost a decade, and I'm still trying to wrap my brain around how anyone in college could take 18 hours to read Charlotte's Web...

In his defense, I too have been known to come down with a whopping case of senioritis for the one class I am taking that requires lit searching. On the other hand, I do my lit searching while trying to be the internal peppy cheerleader to get the rest of my brain in the game, and never EVER do I complain to the teacher. Ever.

There are shortcuts to lit searches. Most of them involve "share the responsibility with a friend who is researching the same/similar topic". He needs to learn how to take up residence in a library. Mine likes me so much, they gave me a key so I could let myself in/out after hours.