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The Mindset of the Incoming College Freshmen
Beloit College has come out with its annual Mindset List of what the incoming class (of 2013) has always known and has never known. "For these students, ... the Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables. They have never used a card catalog to find a book. ... Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible. ... Rap music has always been mainstream. ... Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled. ... Amateur radio operators have never needed to know Morse code."
In my world, Britney Spears has never been featured on a Classic Rock Radio Station.
Dave
'The European Union has always existed'.
You must be new here...or wait, they must be new here. They're not new here yet, but will be new here soon, hence, news about being new here not yet but soon.
Not news new here? Not new.
...I just told my Electronics 1001 students about the tube testers they used to have at Seven-Eleven. I'll have a 12AU6 and a Slurpee, please. rj
... and U2 sucks.
...with my eyesight failing from old age like this, it's too hard to aim if you're across the street.
Somewhere between reactionary neophilia and reactionary neophobia, there is a sparsely populated middle ground where things are evaluated on their own merits, and new things are not automatically good nor old things automatically bad, or vice versa. The modern predilection for the new is just as robotic and mindless as the pre-modern predilection for tradition, the only difference being that we're now indoctrinated into neophilia by advertising instead of being indoctrinated into neophobia by religion.
Maybe, if we learned from the past instead of ignoring it, we wouldn't feel compelled to reinvent COBOL every thirty years. Then we would have been spared the horror of Visual Basic, and then later, Python. Can't wait to see what the next lumbering reanimated monster from the forgotten past will be.
Oh wait, I can already guess: another implementation of Scheme.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Paper bricks the RIAA will throw at you when they catch you downloading music.
I find it hard to believe that there aren't still a lot of school libraries out there that still use card catalogues. But what do I know.
I think there's at least a 10-year delay between birth and awareness of international politics; the first UK PM I remember John Major
I do remember the excitement we all felt when Salsa was officially the fastest-growing condiment in North America. Heady days, those.
This is interesting. Wiki tells me the first web pages went up in December 1990. Those early days of the web have really moved into the realm of history, albeit recent history.
I don't recall it ever being socially unaccebtable, though I do know it was considered - and is, if you ask me - a stupid thing to do, up there with jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.
Since when is RSVP out of our lexicon? I never got that memo.
Well, the European Community has existed since the 50s; this one's more of a technicality.
And Tianammen Square happened before they were born! Yikes.
I imagine this has been true since the 60s, at least.
As opposed to what? The GNP?
And I bet there's someone on Slashdot who cares! :)
I don't think there were any flat-screen TVs in 1991 - unless you count those flat-glass CRTs, which don't really count.
Hah! I doubt that happens very often.
Quayle had power? Biden has power?
That only became blase in the late 90s, as far as I'm concerned
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
There's something to that. This is a generation that grew up thinking Jerry Springer was normal and acceptable behavior.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
What gives you the right to say that? You're generalising my generation. You are implying that we all listen to rap, and we all conform. You are implying that we are all stupid, and we all are materialistic. I do not listen to rap. I listen to Slayer. I am not stupid. I kick my whole classes ass at the academic bowl every year. I know about these things. I know who the green giant is. We are not all ignorant. It's like me saying your generation is the pot smoking generation. Or maybe you're older. Maybe you're the racist generation. You can't generalise a whole generation of people. You're saying that all the people who will spend the vast majority of their life in the 21st century are ignorant conformists who listen to rap. That's not very fair of you.
Lol at this retort to a "white trash generation" claim.
Why would that put us in any kind of trouble? Is it particularly important to know that some countries on the equator are cold? How is that relevant to anything? This list looks to me like an entertainment piece, reminding people of rapid culture changes in the US or the world. It doesn't exist to show us that we have a failing education system.
We're fucked and we've fucked their future. I don't think that one's on the list, but, I'm guessing, it's something any bright grad will know.
Are you fucking kidding me? They've got another 4 years and $95,000 worth of debt to rack up before they sue the college for not being handed a six-figure salary WITH their diploma. Yeah, talk about a fucked system.
IMHO, we haven't begun to see fucked yet, with the ignorance that MTV likes to portray as the Real World. Let's hope there are still some out there who still see the morality of the world today AND are bright enough to see that we have more than ONE political party out there.
But my point is we do not all listen to rap. Some of us might. And some of us might listen to Led Zeppelin and Rush.
... still - on the the bright side - at least we got fucked....
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
Soon they will also be people who only remember when Fermat's Last Theorem was a solved problem, not one of the great mysteries told to young kids interested in mathematics. I've worked for a few years teaching number theory to highschool students and it came as a shock when I realized that I was teaching some students who had actually been born after Andrew Wiles had proved Fermat's Last Theorem. The proof of FLT was one of the defining moments in my mathematical childhold. And in a year or two, those kids will in college. There really isn't any simple problem that has the same wonderful history to rope kids into doing math by looking really easy and yet having such a convoluted and romantic history. Even the oldest two unsolved problems in mathematics (whether there are any odd perfect numbers and whether there are infinitely many even perfect numbers) don't have the same sort of romance to them: No one ever claimed they had a beautiful proof of these. Ok, someone now go ahead and mark this an off-topic ramble by an old-codger...
I quote, "What's wrong withe status quo? It works for me!"
Argh.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
At what I feel may be a very real risk of WHOOSH, I'll respond. This hate on "generalising" is totally irrational. Humans are habit forming, pattern matching biological machines who owe a large part of our success as a species to the ability to generalise. Forming connections based on observed behaviours between multiple sources and using those connections to draw conclusions. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but largely useful. Surely you recognise that in even attempting to speak on the character on something as widely varied as the culture of a generation of people, you're dealing with such huge numbers of people that in order to say anything of non-obvious value means identifying the largest occupied unions of the set. What's crazy here is your apparent level of butthurt over someone putting a label on something which by your tone you already knew to be true.
Or maybe you're hating on generalisations for the sake of them being generalisations. Which is twisted in its own ironic way because it's not based on any proof that abstraction is a bad thing, but rather on the feared result of being subject to some inappropriate application of generalisation to an individual. So really you're damning generalisation as a whole because some idiots misuse it. Generalising generalising not out of its most frequent use, but most feared misuse, a highly faulty premise.
What the fuck? What is this bullshit? This is not "news". Put this shit back in Idle, or better yet, give it back to Oprah where it belongs.
As a upcoming freshmen let me make a few points. 3. The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables. Shrek came out in 2001. I remember part of the first 11 years of my life. Including the Jolly Green Giant (not much but enough to never call Shrek the green giant). 4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book. My first Elementary School had one, so did the public library back then. 8. Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible. That's pretty regional, it is only in the last few years they have caught on where I live 19. They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P. Send a Reply/Confirmation? 21. Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled. ??? 27. Christopher Columbus has always been getting a bad rap. Not in my school(s). 44. There have always been flat screen televisions. Maybe, but how many people had them earlier in the 90's (my childhood). 51. Britney Spears has always been heard on classic rock stations. She didn't really become popular till the late 90s. How'd she get on classics for my entire life when she didn't start until halfway through it? 53. Someone has always been asking: "Was Iraq worth a war?" They're gonna be asking that a long time. 54. Most communities have always had a mega-church. I let this slide because they used "most".
A PDF reader than can only display a single PDF file. It is immune to rm but is difficult to back up and doesn't have a search feature.
This is a generation that grew up thinking Jerry Springer was normal and acceptable behavior.
Because their parents suck, politically-correct panty-waisted fools who "feel" their children won't love them if a parent say, means, and enforces:
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
"you have died of dysentery"
As well as MS-DOS and the Apple II.
They say that "Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled", but that confuses me. Obviously this is a reference to Clinton, but Bush was a well-known druggie and drunk. Am I to believe that he commonly snorted coke off of coeds' naked bodies and drove drunk, but never puffed a joint? I suppose that is possible, but I find it hard to believe.
> "They have never used a card catalog to find a book"
Yawn. I was a UM Freshman in 1992. At that point, I think the card catalog was still there, but there were OLD, tattered signs perched on top warning that it was no longer maintained (and apparently hadn't been maintained in years). My high school library had a card catalog, but that was because it sucked. The public library downtown had greenscreen terminals since middle school.
What does having been born in 1973 imply?
* We never understood why our parents got so excited by seeing moonwalkers on TV. Men had *always* been walking on the moon.
* We didn't notice the videogame crash of 1983, because we'd all moved on and gotten Commodore 64s for Christmas anyway. Six years later, shopping for Amiga toyz, it blew our minds that there were STILL stores selling stuff for the Atari 2600, even though we still thought the Colecovision and Vectrex were kind of cool in their own way.
* NES? Yawn. Amiga rulez. Well, ok... Sonic on the Genesis is kind of cool...
* A *Gameboy*?!? (Retch. Retch. Vomit.) They're for teenyboppers and poor kids. (pulls out Lynx)
* Sprites were invented for programming convenience.
* You mean assemblers weren't *always* two-pass?
* We learned binary by drawing 8x8 grids, writing "256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" over them, coloring in the squares where we wanted the pixel to be non-transparent, then added up the numbers above each row's darkened squares and added another DATA statement with 8 values separated by commas to define our custom characters.
* Unix was lame. It was like PCs, but worse, because at least PCs had primitive color and shitty games. Linux didn't become interesting until the internet and web servers made it relevant.
* When picking a foreign language to study in high school and/or college, German was the obvious choice. Spanish might have been practical, and French was the language of love, but German was the language of zer0daywar3z.
* We pissed off our parents by running a fake BBS off the family phone line for a week so we could spend more on a US Robotics HST 9600 baud modem than some of our friends paid for their first *cars*... and smile, because we were getting them for less than half price with the sysop discount.
* Every high school had at least one really, really insanely rich kid who put a car battery and rigged-up car phone in his locker his freshman year so he could act cool and call his answering machine at home between classes to check his messages. By 12th grade, it was officially forbidden by the school, and he got a detention the day his shiny new brick rang in history class.
* People around campus pointed at you, and called you "the laptop guy" because you had a 12-pound luggable in your backpack that was *almost* powerful enough to run WordPerfect for DOS without too much lag... as long as there was a power outlet nearby.
When I was a college freshman in the early 1970s, this was our world:
Cell phones did not exist, although most doctors had some type of telephone in their cars.
Home computers and on-line banking and on-line shopping did not exist. Text messaging did not exist. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter did not exist (I still don't know what they are).
Some of the older telephones still were the rotary phones, where we had to dial the number. We could hear the pulse type dialing being used. The newer phones probably had the buttons and tones, by then. If we dialed 0, by itself, we could talk to the operator. If I am not mistaken, we still had to pay extra, on our monthly bill, for each extra telephone in the house.
Typewriters were used to type letters. Some were electric and some were purely mechanical.
Many secretaries knew how to take dictation by shorthand.
Slide rules were frequently used by engineers and scientists to perform addition, subtraction, roots, logarithms and trigonometry. Pocket calculators did not exist. However, adding machines did exist.
Nearly all of the appliances that we owned were controlled by mechanical knobs and levers. It was more of an analog world, although large businesses did have computers.
Many businesses still used punched cards to store data for computer databases.
We were being encouraged to used trans fats instead of saturated fats because they were supposedly less dangerous than saturated fats. Now we are being told that trans fats are even worse.
Cars needed a minor tune up every 6,000 miles and a major tuneup every 12,000 miles. Engines usually needed to be overhauled at about 100,000 miles. Most of our gasoline powered cars had carburetors. To start a car when it was cold, we had to pump the gas peddle several times first. On some older cars, we also still had to use a mechanical choke.
Police cars could do about 140 MPH and policemen carried revolvers instead of pistols.
I hoped I would not be drafted and sent to Vietnam. Fortunately, the war was winding down by then, an few people were drafted that year.
AIDs did not exist and I had never even heard of herpes, until several years later.
If a young person asked the barber to not cut his hair too short, the barber frequently cut it somewhat shorter than he wanted anyway (for some reason). Eventually barbers stopped doing that.
In many states our social security number was used as our drivers license number. Grocery stores would not accept credit cards, so we usually paid by check. When writing a check at the grocery store or elsewhere, the cashier or clerk usually wrote our driver's license number on the back of our check. Over the decades, many thousands of people have seen my driver's license number and written it on the back of my thousands of checks.
Some do indeed have a search feature. It's typically at the end of the file.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
As a student, I say, fuck that, my dear academic, and fuck your easy willingness to give up on us. We clueless, cynical, little automatons have been tasked with developing our own frameworks for filtering and handling information blasted at us from society's great unmetered firehose even as you sit there whining on Slashdot about your abject failure to connect with us. We, the post-post-modern twerps that you are griping about, have grown up DRENCHED in information, to the point that we're numbed to it. We have not experienced the type of developmental cocoons that previous generations wore into adulthood; we didn't grow up in a crappy town where our best sources of information were an out-of-date encyclopedia, Time magazine, and the evening news. We grew up with Internet access and a TV in our bedroom, and we realized at quite a young age that most of the ideas we thought we were alone in having were actually shared by countless thousands or millions. It's discouraging to the thinker, really; quite often, the instant we have a thought, we type it into Google and realize that the discussion is not merely mature, but closed. We realized early on that we were not alone, yet nobody cared what we had to say.
I can say, without specific knowledge of your field, that your job is fundamentally two pronged: it is the promotion of the best approximation of reality available, and it is also the displacement of the less accurate models which came before. Modernism/postmodernism had an important job to do, and retains some importance as a perspective, a naggling doubt at the back of every good student's mind, but it's beginning to reach saturation in my own, younger generation. The holdouts who haven't either digested the pill to the best of their abilities or passed it through their system are getting rare outside of some fairly recognizable enclaves. It's time to react to that fact. We young people have been told to ask "why?" as a reflex, true, but many of us have unfortunately developed the habit of making snap judgments in the face of informational overload. We have no authorities; we have no role models. The politicians are liars; the businessmen are crooks; the priests are pedophiles. We never learned about righteousness and values; we were taught consumerism and encouraged to swim in knowledge as if we would learn by mere proximity. We are three generations removed from the cultural revolutions of the sixties and seventies. Our grandparents were at Woodstock enjoying sex, drugs, and rock and roll; our parents grew up shaking their heads at the hypocrisy of their suddenly-reactionary baby boomer parents, and now we, their kids, don't know what the hell to think. They say that it takes three generations to breed accent out of spoken language; we've left respect for authority so far behind us that we can't even conceive what the fuss was about.
Our childhood is getting longer, as is our adolescence, although we were exposed to the facts of life as soon as we could reach a keyboard. It seems that college is no longer a privilege, but a right awarded for simply not screwing up massively in life. Many of us arrive with no specific goal in mind, expecting to have our hands held as they were in high school, and we often wind up with a degree in hand and no plans for its use. Alternately, many of us believe (often correctly) that our future employers care little about what is taught in college and that simply completing the routine is what matters. The reasoners, the deep thinkers, and those interested in pursuing science for its own sake are in there too, but we've always been there, Mr. Academic. Our deep-thinking minds have always been attracted to the college atmosphere, but those of us with that mindset make up a proportionally smaller fragment of the new student body. You, sir, are in a situation where you need to search diligently for the part of that scholastically-minded fragment that's interested in learning, but afraid to step forth; the ones that have been repeatedly abused or isolated
Then at the top are lines like "Members of the class of 2013 won't be surprised when they can charge a latte on their cell phone and curl up in the corner to read a textbook on an electronic screen.".... nor should anyone who has recently left the cave. Hell, the first guy I knew that got an eReader was in his 60s. You're not excused from observing your surroundings just because you've made it to (or past) middle-aged.
I think it emphasizes the speed of societal and technological change which has been going on of late (say, the last two decades). I recall hearing in the early '00s how we are now undergoing a greater increase in knowledge as a society in a single day than occurred during the whole of WW2 - or something to that effect. That much change, that quickly, can have a drastic impact on a society, whether intentional or not.
Consider: kids today have, in all likelihood, always had cell phones and SMS. I'm 28 and I remember having friends whos' parents did not yet have a house phone. I do not SMS regularly; yet kids today are glued to it. My wife is a handful of years younger than I, and she is more inclined to text than I am. But it goes beyond that.
Is a person more inclined to pick up a book and read it, or search it out, if all they're familiar with (or primarily familiar with) are computers and web pages? There are kids out there who were born after Internet Explorer 3 came out who are fully 'plugged in' and have little to no interaction with 'dead media'.
Ignoring the possibility that they will potentially remain mostly illiterate throughout their lives, this is a huge, HUGE jump in world perception from what even my generation experienced: I'm 28, for crying out loud! I am NOT old, yet I see what the "youth" are doing and have access to, and what they haven't experienced, and I'm blown away by the changes.
Case in point: computers in schools. They were just starting to be a big thing when I was a kid, with the Apple IIe, III and similar monochrome display, 5.25" floppy, CLI driven machines. When computerized card catalogs came along, they were CLI based up through college. Most of the current generation equates 'typing commands' with something vaguely "programming" or "hacking" and use (in terms of functionality, from what I've seen) horrible web based catalogs. They interface through a GUI, with their mouse, and mostly don't have a comprehension of "data" (or data/file types) so much as "files" and "folders".
Anyway, I'm getting way off here. The point I'm trying to make is: things are changing a lot, and whereas it used to be that Grandma couldn't relate to Johny and his evil music with a beat that wasn't about baby Jesus in the 1920s, we're now seeing a "cultural gap" occur every 5 or so years - often with clear punctuation points as new fads come into the forefront (emo, rap, Xbox, etc.). Those things all shape and form culture pretty quickly to be something completely alien to those who were in the same "spot" not long ago.
Did you know that tight polyester dickies (slacks, whatever you want to call them) in horrible colors have come and gone twice again since the 1970s, both in the last several years? THAT is what I'm talking about.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's just a different genre of mindless grunting.
Thank you for showing your ignorance. Death and thrash metal (including Slayer) are both incredibly intricate and demanding styles of music. I am not sure what kind of music you listen to, but Slayer's compositions and playing ability are light years ahead of ANY popular music these days. You might not like it, this form of music may not be your cup of tea, but calling it mindless is just plain ignorant. Each member of that band (Araya excepted) has more musical ability than pretty much everything you hear on the radio. I would be very interested to hear... what do you listen to that you base your comparison off of? I listen to literally everything, and I put death metal in the same vaunted category as jazz and classical in terms of musicianship.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I was a UM Freshman in 1992... We learned binary by drawing 8x8 grids, writing "256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" over them
I was a Mississippi State freshman in 1979, and we still could only fit "128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" above an 8x8 grid. I hope to God that your UM was Ole Miss!
For the first time reading Slashdot, a comment has made we want to take a radioactive shower and wash that concept out of my mind.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Wait wait wait. "Politically-correct" parents are responsible for kids growing up thinking that the sort of behavior seen on Jerry Springer was normal? "Politically-correct" parents would let their kids watch South Park?
Eh, no. Political correctness can be stupid, but it's not the sort of stupidity that neglects filtering what children see and hear -- if anything, it's the opposite sort of stupidity, that thies to make sure that children don't see and hear anything "offensive".
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Of course you kick your whole class' ass at the academic bowl - you're in a generation of ignorant conformists! :P
Don't get me wrong - I've been a Slayer fan since the 80's, but to say that they have more musical ability than pretty much everything on the radio is just plain wrong. They have written some fantastic stuff and have the ability to play fast, but both Kerry and Jeff get sloppy when they play fast. Tom plays simple bass lines and doesn't get too complicated with the vocals. Dave is a fantastic drummer though.
If you want to compare musical ability of metal players with what you hear on the radio, there are thousands of better choices.
Oh - and to get back to the great grandparent, I don't think the article said that all of this generation listen to rap. Even the quote in the summary says, "Rap music has always been mainstream." You can't deny that for kids going into college this year.
Addlepated - punk & metal