Getting rid of Grade 12 in high school

I am all for it with respect to the high school situation. Read more at the NY Times Magazine.

But, .... that means that my freshman class will be a whole bunch of 17-year olds?  At least when they are 18, I can tell them (and I do) that they are adults and I won't babysit them .... if they are 17 and living in the dorm .... wait, I was 17 when I headed to the engineering college.  Hmmmm .....

So, these minor issues aside, I do not agree with high school ending at 11 if the argument is being advanced strictly on economic efficiencies that are nothing but budgetary considerations.  Because, I could then propose, a sort of reductio ad absurdum, that we may as well transform K-12 into K-9. (Yes, pun intended! arf arf!!!)

Advice to college freshmen, and returning students too

Daniel Drezner:

1. Turn off your cell phone before entering class. You are 21 or under, so think about the following question: is there any call so important that the pain of missing it exceeds the pain of the death stare that will emanate from our instructor when your Ringtone goes off?
2. For that matter, shut down your wifi as well. Think you can check Facebook, e-mail, Twitter, and still absorb the class lecture? You can't. Don't even try, because the moment you drift away, it will be next to impossible to re-engage with the class session. For those students resistant to this idea, here's a pragmatic piece of advice -- try shutting the wifi down for the first 20 minutes of the class session. If the class still puts you into a stupor, surf away!
3. Read your f#%$ing syllabi. There are things that will annoy your professors more than asking questions that are clearly answered in your course syllabus..... things like waterboarding.
4. Yes, you can use Wikipedia as a research tool; no, you can't footnote it. Sure, Wikipedia is one obvious route towards researching a paper. The key, however, is not to stop at Wikipedia, but to follow the footnotes. Citing a Wikipedia entry is lame; citing a research article referenced by the entry is significantly less lame.
   

"History" and the class of 2012

With every passing year, the distance between freshmen and faculty like me widens even more. I used to joke about how we don't manufacture VCRs anymore; that joke ended a few years ago. Then I moved on to DVD players, which was even more short-lived as a joke. It helps, therefore, to be reminded of how different the context is for incoming freshman students. And that is what the Beloit College Mindset List does:

This month, almost 2 million first-year students will head off to college campuses around the country. Most of them will be about 18 years old, born in 1990 when headlines sounded oddly familiar to those of today: Rising fuel costs were causing airlines to cut staff and flight schedules; Big Three car companies were facing declining sales and profits; and a president named Bush was increasing the number of troops in the Middle East in the hopes of securing peace. However, the mindset of this new generation of college students is quite different from that of the faculty about to prepare them to become the leaders of tomorrow.
....The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.
It is a multicultural, politically correct and “green” generation that has hardly noticed the threats to their privacy and has never feared the Russians and the Warsaw Pact.

There is a chance that most of the items on the list will sound bizarre and ancient to students--almost a historical time capsule--while to us faculty it was, well, our life :-)