On Thu, 6 Sep 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> It's that time of year when, posted in various faculty workrooms and on
> various listservs I am seeing that witty treatise on how "different" todays
> college students are from us - how students born in the 1980's don't remember
> Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan, don't care about the Vietnam War, have grown up
> with the Internet etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseaum.
>
<snip>
I've seen those lists, and I think they're useful. I very much disagree
with an us v. them approach to students, but it's good to keep in mind,
as the years pass, that what is common knowledge to you may not be to
them.
I was once a teaching fellow for a professor in social psych who gave a
long, long lecture about attitude change and persuasion using the Patty
Hearst case as an example. The students, many of them, had never heard of
it. (I'd heard of it, but I'm 34 and was a kid when it happened, so it was
vague to me as well.)
Keeping students' knowledge bases and experience in mind is a good way to
keep *them* from developing an "us v. them" attitude.
Robin
*******************************************************************************
Robin Pearce "We are all curators at heart, I suppose,
Boston University of items that we fear no one else will have time for."
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -Thomas Lynch
*******************************************************************************
