What Americans Don’t Understand About Teachers and Professors
An Illustration of What Truly Ails Today’s Higher Education System:
Martin E. Ross, Boston (
The writer is professor emeritus of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern University)
:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/opinion/letters/nyu-tough-professor.html
A key factor is Professor Jones’s observation that about a decade earlier he noticed a loss of focus in students. I noticed the same phenomenon starting about 15 years ago in the university students I taught, long before the deleterious impact of the pandemic on students’ performance.
Overpampering of children by parents and teachers combined with soaring tuition has turned students into entitled customers demanding to be catered to as such. The student-professor interaction has become far more transactional than in previous years, with administrators increasingly inclined to side with their customers.
Students expect their professors to be like either Mister Rogers or Stephen Colbert, and woe to those less entertaining ones who dare to assign poor performers the grades they deserve.
What’s Wrong with Gen Z?https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/american-teens-sadness-depression-anxiety/629524/
Derek Thompson notes:
“Anxious parents, in seeking to insulate their children from risk and danger, are unintentionally transferring their anxiety to their kids.
I want to pull out two points from Julian’s complex essay. First, children are growing up slower than they used to. Today’s children are less likely to drive, get a summer job, or be asked to do chores. The problem isn’t that kids are lazy (homework time has risen), or that scrubbing dishes magically dispels anxiety disorders. Rather, Julian wrote, these activities “provide children with two very important things”: tolerating discomfort and having a sense of personal competence.
Second, researchers have noted a broad increase in an “accommodative” parenting style. If a girl is afraid of dogs, an “accommodation” would be keeping her away from every friend’s house with a dog, or if a boy won’t eat vegetables, feeding him nothing but turkey loaf for four years (an actual story from the article). These behaviors come from love. But part of growing up is learning how to release negative emotions in the face of inevitable stress. If kids never figure out how to do that, they’re more likely to experience severe anxiety as teenagers”.
The Crisis of Men and Boys
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/opinion/crisis-men-masculinity.html
David Brooks:
If you’ve been paying attention to the social trends, you probably have some inkling that boys and men are struggling, in the U.S. and across the globe.
They are struggling in the classroom. American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be “school ready” than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics. By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class, ranked by G.P.A., are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys. In 2020, at the 16 top American law schools, not a single one of the flagship law reviews had a man as editor in chief.