There’s a lot of fear expressed by young men that they will be falsely accused of sexual assault. I’m not sure how common this is, but many pontificate on the subject so much that you’d assume it’s an hourly occurrence. This does not seem to be the case. I’d wager it’s more an issue the other way.
And what is the deal with Herman Cain?
Students tell me all the time that they don’t read. Yet they spend endless time parked in front of a computer. I know they’re not spending all that time watching YouTube or playing games. Heck, even most computer games require a fair amount of reading. Then there’s the fact that nearly every waking moment spent away from a computer is spent with their face buried in another electronic screen. They’re reading; they simply may not be reading anything of quality.
This amused me that within days two people called press conferences to announce that they wouldn’t be doing something. How bizarre is that? That’s politics, and honestly is probably a bad sign when the populace is begging people to enter the race and they will not.
Yesterday was a sad day with the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. When I heard the news it just made me incredibly sad. I wasn’t sure why at first. Certainly I have no real connection to Jobs. While I use some Apple products, I hardly consider myself a diehard fan. Nor would I be as sad to hear of the passing of many other corporate giants (not that I would be happy, either).
No, I think Jobs touched something deep in the cultural psyche. He was an inventor (even if often over-credited with Apple innovations). He was a guru of technology. He was an icon. He’s what so many of us aspire to be, and all of us admire. The reason I was sad about his passing when I wouldn’t be with others’ is because he was unique. Something deep down told me that we wouldn’t see another Steve Jobs ever, or another of his kind for a long while.
This is how I often feel with students. I know they’re not entirely listening at any given moment, but what surprises me is that they’re not listening to people other than me. So something like Occupy Wall Street doesn’t even register when I say it because they’ve heard it somewhere else before. At least I don’t personally feel as bad.
Students only hearing half of what a professor says isn’t always a problem. They may simply not understand an assignment and get a lower grade, but nobody dies. Still, there are those times where hearing every detail matters. Those are the times the professor rants on about a single concept for three or four weeks.
The color red as a symbol probably isn’t one of those life or death instances, but you certainly won’t sound as dumb if you hear it all.
It seems like every couple of months there’s an overhaul to a major Facebook feature and people freak out in response. I’m not entirely sure why people pretend to care about how they receive their status updates, when in truth Facebook is just there to feed into their narcissistic worldview. I suppose anything that inhibits that is frustrating. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to update my Facebook with some clever pictures of cats.
It’s not uncommon to have wayward students wander into your class. The worst example was I onetime I had a student sit through thirty minutes of a speech class before standing up and announcing to everyone she was supposed to be in calculus, instead. I really should stop doing differential equations to begin the semester.
Many students complain about having to take introductory classes because they “know it already.” These are usually the students who make a C or D in class. Perhaps because they do know it all and are simply bored. More likely they don’t know as much as they think.
There’s a great deal of social pressure to follow any crowd. If everyone else stands to cheer, then you feel the pressure to do the same. This is why every performance, literally any performance, now ends in a standing ovation. All it takes is one person rising and everyone around them feels uncomfortable until they join in.
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