Reply #29: Having sat in a classroom [View All]

[melm00se]

over the last 6 semesters (after being out of school for north of 25 years), I can really understand this.

the recent high school graduates are, frankly, scary.

They have:

- No study skills (all studying for an exam is should not happen in the hallway before the exam)
- No ability to string more than 5 words together in a coherent thought
- No ability to write using basic grammar
- Minimal vocabulary skills (words with more than 2 syllables seem to escape them)
- No research skills (if it's not in wikipedia it couldn't have happened. libraries? what's a library/card catalog?)

These kids couldn't draw a big picture conclusion from the data (which, BTW, is given to them - forget uncovering the data on their own) if you gave them a fricking paint by numbers kit.

I have seen some of their writings. One professor, being close to me in age (and with the same level of frustration I have so has found a kindred spirit in the classroom), has shown me some of the papers turned in (after sanitizing the names) and OH MY GOD!

- Run on sentences that are so incredibly long that you feel like they are going to continue into the next paragraph.
- Spelling? how can you screw that up with spellchecker?
- 10 page papers that long only because the margins and fonts selected make a 5 pager into 10.
- Obvious plagiarism (one of my personal favorites): 5 paragraphs...each written with a completely different style and variations of English (3 pages using British spelling and colloquialisms and 2 with American). And that was going to be missed...why?
- (Another personal favorite) Recycled papers. New opening and closing paragraphs in an attempt to pass off an comparative Lit paper as an History paper.

(something that the kiddies haven't figured out: you have to submit a softcopy of your paper. why? so they go into a big bank of submitted papers which allows the teachers to determine if the same paper has been turned in multiple times but in different classes/sections not to mention the bigger tools that catch plagiarism.)

Don't even get me started on public speaking/presentations. (yes, I know that some people get scared and fall apart but c'mon! at least give it the appearance that you rehearsed...even once). If an alien came down and tried to figure out English from these speeches, they would have to conclude that "um", "ah", "so" and "like" are all valid conjunctions and, in fact, are the most common 4 words in the English language.

Time management skills? You have to, at the very least, know when the damn exams are. In each class I have taken, no less than 2 people have shown up and learned that there was an exam that week (for which they haven't studied nor had the required blue book nor, if appropriate, scantron forms).

I am really hoping that these kids will get it together before they hit the real world otherwise we are going to have real problems with folks who can't:

- Draw conclusions
- Communicate clearly and effectively

all three of which are absolutely critical components to success