This was fascinating. It actually is a cultural monograph after the manner of the ones I read when studying anthropology as an undergraduate. The dean has placed a set of bookshelves in the faculty lounge in our building. As far as I can tell, she is the only contributor so far. I have read several pieces of fiction from the shelf, and studiously avoided the professional material. After this I may give The Saber-Toothed Curriculum a try.
Teachers everywhere observe that "kids are different than they was" -- "no, they ain't; no, they ain't, but you got to know the territory." (with apologies to Meredith Willson) This woman decided to check it out. So she adopted a pseudonym and enrolled (in her fifties) as a freshman at her own university - that is, the university at which she is a member of the anthropology faculty. She lived in a dorm, took gen ed classes including freshman seminar, and made a study of life on the other side. She knows "the territory" now and has formed some interesting conclusions.
While we (teachers) don't understand why they don't just "do the reading" or whatever else is assigned. She found out. And she found that she was making the same judgment call. She found that the messages we give students to "help them adjust to university" are repetitive and predictable and not the sort of thing that is actually useful to students.
She found that our plaintive cry for "community" is anachronistic, a wish to go back to the university of many generations ago - a generation when freshmen were required to wear ugly hats and step off the sidewalks for upperclassmen, a generation when almost all undergraduates were white males.
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