For years & years & years people used to ask -- are this year's students any different than the students you used to have -- and I used to hate the question. For years & years & years I thought there was no difference between the students I have now and the students I used to have.
People have stopped asking me the question -- and I think I know why they have stopped asking me the question, they know what I know. These students are different. Matters have changed. Change is inevitable, and it is not a pretty change, not a change I like.
I won't go into the many changes -- it would take too long -- but I will go into one striking change, the change that prompted my comments.
Every year I tell an absolutely riveting story to my class, it is the story of how my niece was kidnapped. One of the reasons I tell the story is because I know this will keep them awake. No one will be bored by this story. Every eye will be turned up.
Not this year. This year, in two separate classes, two students put their head on the desk. They couldn't keep their head up for the hour it takes me to tell the story. Twice during the story they put their head down.
I've told the story for 25 years now. Not one student in 25 years worth of classes -- hundreds of classes -- ever put his or her head down for one second during my story. They were riveted, fascinated. Not this year. This year two separate students couldn't keep their heads up.
I keep repeating two because I could say, well, this one student is so terrible, so tired, that I can forgive him or her. But two students is a trend; two students is a discernible difference.
These two particular students have driven me nuts. All semester long they have dropped their heads down during class. I can't help but focus on them. I thought--when I tell this story they won't do that. They did. They did!
I've given you one small example of how radically different some of this year's students are. Of course many students today are just like the students I had 25 years ago, but there are a handful in every class that are so bad, so bored, so fidgety--so unlike any students I ever came across, that I thank God I am close to retirement.
Every generation says the younger generation is terrible and the end of the world is upon us. No, the end of the world is not upon us, but it is time for me to get out. I cannot explain such profound boredom, such profound disrespect: laying one's head down in the middle of a class while a teacher is talking. I'm not used to such behavior. It is time for me to leave. I don't know how to handle such behavior. I'm becoming an old foggy. Time to go.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein