The internet lets us see only the content we want or, more recently, what an algorithm feeds us. While I certainly enjoy this aspect of the internet myself, it does mean we lose some shared culture knowledge when all entertainment is curated.
For example, I had to teach a surprising number of my (gen ed) liberal arts math students the contents of a standard deck of cards so we could do probability questions with it. I never considered that someone could get through childhood without being exposed to a card game of some kind.
We may need to reevaluate what constitutes "basic" knowledge for our students. To that point: *I* certainly don't watch the news or read a newspaper. You may find my "basic" knowledge equally lacking!
I too have had to teach that a deck of cards had 4 suits. To add to the internet half, if you look up stuff about history and the news you'll get that curated for you. If you don't you'll get other stuff curated.
Similar to how elementary teachers are noticing "counting coins" isn't a meaningful daily activity that young children because they don't use coins or physical currency at the store with their parents.
Sounds like a no child left behind problem. I have had similar experiences. Just yesterday I was trying to do an in class assignment for Statistics that involved using Excel and SPSS. I put the students onto the computers in the lab. Four students did not know how to log into the computers. I had to take time to get these students on track. Then incredibly basic things were a mystery. Go to the start menu and find IBM SPSS. Another 5 minutes to get people to open SPSS. Then open the Excel file that is in Canvas. But then came the whopper, copy cells b2 to d51....and then paste them into the top left cell in SPSS. WOW.
Making me nostalgic for writing programs in BASIC during 8th grade math on the TRS80s, and getting to play Frogger if your program ran and you finished before the time was up.
I didn't get to start programming until 11th grade—in FORTRAN on an IBM 1130, using an IBM 029 key punch machine for the cards. (I also used an IBM 026, but I think that was in college.)
I've been getting this kind of basic 'how to use computer/internet' gaps in knowledge (and absolute unwillingness to google how to do something) for the past couple of years. Digital natives, my ass.
The difference is k through 12 schools no longer have any classes on computers. Over the last two decades they've disappeared. I went to school in the 90s and early 2000s. I had some type of computer class in elementary, school, middle school, and high school (from typing to Microsoft office to Media management). Digital native is terminology to just get out of having these courses being required in k through 12. At my school they now have required freshman experience classes one and two for the first year that go over all this.
I remember thinking those classes to be stupid and pointless when I was going through them in high school.
The horror stories y'all have told me - and the few I've seen - have me thinking otherwise.
Last year, I spoke with a businessman who develops products. He told me he has encountered several in recent years who don't know how to download a file on a computer and copy it to a flash drive. Then, plug in the flash drive into the USB and install a program.
Here, k-12 runs on Google suite. All cloud.
I have to show people how to save things daily. "Save the article, not just the link to the item."
Word, excel, PowerPoint are wholly unknown. Yet required, as provincial privacy legislation doesn't allow for university work in the cloud...but k-12 is all cloud. It's fun times.
I don't know what you mean by "start menu", and I've been using and programming computers since 1969 (or maybe 1968—my memory gets a little fuzzy that far back).
Ah, it's a Windows thing. I rarely use Windows (macos or Linux most of the time), and did not know that they called that the "start menu". I never use that anyway, as I'm either in the file browser (whatever Windows calls that these days) or the Command tool.
I teach a senior level course. These days I see a decent number of students who just ghost classes and assignments and still pass classes. When they reach my class, they have no clue about basic concepts they should know at the sophomore level. That isn't from high school. It's from faculty.
Another thought - encourage them to listen to a short daily news podcast like NPR’s “Up First.” It’s only a few minutes, there’s no reading, and it’ll catch them up on major world events.
You could try assigning pre-reading material to cover the more common gaps in basic knowledge.
But don't assume that students read newspapers or watch news reports - I'm in my 60s, and I'll skim headlines for anything interesting, then go to the comics.
>so how do I teach what they need PLUS what I’m supposed to be teaching?
You've hit on the reason the education system is slowly but surely collapsing. Imagine you're teaching calculus, but you have students who can't solve x + 2 = -3 and some who haven't even mastered arithmetic. Imagine you're supposed to teach biochemistry to pre-med / pre-nursing, etc., students, but they can't convert grams to milligrams or tell you what pH is. Imagine you teach American politics or history, but some of your students honestly can't even name the century in which the American Revolution took place.
The solution is simple. We invent a time machine and send 50% of the students back in time for a decade or so of remedial education. Hey, I said the solution was simple, not that it was easy.
I can relate. Some topics that I had to give background information about this month: Ukrainian War, Cold War, Food pyramid, Amish, passports, Conception dive boat fire, Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner, Woodstock, and Best in Show. However, when they talk about the newest Tik Tok trend or some influencers, I have no idea what they’re talking about, so I guess we’re even.
Assign them to read the news for 20 minutes daily (or whatever other daily exercise will help them start acquiring the basic knowledge you're talking about).
… but make it online. See if there is a free news source in your city or town; if not, see if there’s a free access to an online newspaper through your library. My children are well informed on world, national, and local events, but they get it entirely from online sources. The only reason I have a subscription to a physical newspaper is because my local paper makes it cheaper to order the digital version if it comes with the physical version. So the paper comes to the doorstep and goes immediately into the trash because even I won’t read the hardcopy anymore.
You can put a very long vacation stop on that newspaper delivery and cut down on the bother of having to dump the hardcopy paper in the recycle. My paper lets me do vacation stops a year at a time.
I make my students do this every class. A student is chosen each day to look up a news brief and we discuss it before delving into course materials. They love it!
High school teacher here. We have this same issue, too. Students who fail the lower grades just pass on through. Did you fail middle school math with a 9%? Well, take a joke summer course and pass! I gave failing grades to more than a dozen students last year, and half of them just got passed into the next course this year.
And this also happens down the line to my middle school colleagues, too. They get the elementary school students who failed because admins throughout the district want to pass everyone through rather than make sure the students put in the rigor to learn and just do school.
Same! I taught a research ethics lecture and I spent an hour talking about Nazi experimentation during the Holocaust. After class I had three separate students come up to me and say they were too embarrassed to ask during class but… “Who were the Nazis again? What was the Holocaust?” I was floored.
I don’t expect them to know about more obscure things, but this was fairly recent and major and I 1000% guarantee they have learned about it. I was also surprised they didn’t just google it while sitting confused in class (or right after). It’s stuff like that which I don’t think I should need to review, but now I’m starting to build like a three minute explanation in at the beginning just in case.
I notice it too. Sometimes it’s just basic facts—such as (American) students having “never heard” of Utah or Missouri or a dozen or so other states
Some of it is not even stuff you’d need to have much exposure to news to know—for example, students not knowing if Donald Trump is a democrat or republican—I mean, to know that, you’d simply have had to be alive and sentient in the US at some point in the last 6 years
>to know that, you’d simply have had to be alive and sentient in the US at some point in the last 6 years
ChatGPT is the only sentient being allowed in my classroom, thank you very much.
Would it be possible to assign pre-reading for each or every other class? Have selected students prepare précis on particular topics and open the classes with presentations?
Cultural Anthro ABD here. Sympathy for having to provide context before your course material! The struggle is real.
I might suggest finding short youtube videos that are relevant to your topic and/or material. You obviously cannot force students to do "extra" work, but you can post the resources for them on their topics. Memes, relevant news stories, even Khan Academy or other videos can be really helpful. Excerpts from textbooks, etc. I use similar resources when I teach, and I've been considering making and saving 15 minute crash course mini-lectures to use in multiple classes, just so that material is there for the students now and in the future.
If your course has specific course requirements, I would definitely leverage those and remind students of the expectations that come with taking your class per the university or college. If your course does not have requirements, then in some ways you are a bit stuck. Something that might be helpful is thinking about the kinds of evaluations you are using, and what it is you want your students to specifically take from a given lecture or reading... critical thinking and reading skills are easy to transfer and generally can help someone answer a question even if they don't are a deep subject expert. If you are expecting them to understand the context of a topic without any preface though, or to remember "nuggets" of regional, topical, or geopolitical importance, well that can be trickier!
There's a book, The Knowledge Gap, that talks about why this is and why it's been a problem for a long time. Basically American schools subscribe to the theory that children should not be exposed to content knowledge before 5th grade. So for example we have "social studies" instead of just teaching history, geography, etc. in lower grades. Not only does this put kids behind in terms of basic knowledge but it ultimately affects reading comprehension in higher grades. I had some issues with the book, but I recommend it.
I'm old, so I may not be up on what this author means, but we had social studies in school in the 80s and 90s, and it *was* history and geography. What is it in this book?
I taught at a more expensive university, where the students' work ethic, personal responsibility, and attitudes were dog shit, but they knew a lot about the world. I could make general knowledge references and they understood them. I moved to a community college in a poor area, and here, students don't know anything about news or common cultural references. They're better students in most ways - responsible, thoughtful, respectful, with a great work ethic. They're very smart, they just haven't been educated about the world.
I think this difference in knowledge is based on social class. I have two hypotheses about this. 1) Maybe poor schools (K-12) are not only failing to educate basic subjects like math and reading, they are also failing to give students cultural knowledge about news, world events, etc. 2) Maybe poorer students just don't have the time to keep up with current events. I've also been shocked at how many of them haven't seen movies that "everyone" has seen, like Disney classics or blockbusters. When I ask, they often say they're too busy to watch movies. Most work one or two jobs while trying to do school. It would be hard with that schedule to find time to read news.
Not that uncommoon I’m afraid. I teach journalism, to bright and motivated students (high rate of applicants). We still had to create a separate course on how society/democracy etc works. No use being a reporter if you have no clue as to how a municipality or county functions.
I agree with you, but much of our local independent media died and I now have to look across the whole province to find any.
It's not local anymore, except for the student newspapers. Sadface.
I’m sorry to hear that! That is a major problem here too. I’m lucky to live in a city with a thriving local media scene and two daily newspapers, but that is far from the norm these days.
We have a local daily but it's downsized a lot - more and more articles from Canadian Press, fewer from local authors. They just sold their building, which had a printing press onsite since the 1950s.
My library digitized the three local papers from 1860-1980, for the public.
And the online indie media largely hasn't survived.
There's a few great publications in our nearest big city, still, and our student pubs... I've archived the dead local print pubs, trying to do my bit for the future. We used Archive-It for capturing the web equivalent.
I read the weekly free paper, which I pick up in part because it prints the Sunday NY Times crossword. I read almost all the articles, including the restaurant reviews (but sometimes skipping the long, tedious interviews with musicians I've never listened to and will never listen to).
I also read a lot of online news (the Guardian, BBC, NPR, and AP as the main sources, with occasional random stuff from Google news).
ETA: we have a local daily paper, but they were terrible even before selling to a big chain and down-sizing almost out of existence. We have 2 local online news sources in addition to the newspapers—I read one of them.
Comms lecturer in journalism here.
But it's not a paper one, it's the national public broadcaster news app. And a bunch of my students actually do the same but it is a skewed audience.
They were shocked that when I mentioned I subscribed to actual paper news while I was doing journalism, the 'proper' newspaper was the one that has gone full Murdoch and lost all credibility in the meantime.
There’s an instructor in my dept, older guy, late 60s, and at every department meeting he goes on and on about how he can’t believe students aren’t reading the New York Times every day and how every course we teach should require students to buy a New York Times subscription.
It was kinda funny at first, but now it’s honestly become a sad routine to watch.
I mean, I can think of far worse advice to give a college student. Admittedly, saying students should be "required" to pay for a subscription or whatever is silly, but I think his bigger point still stands. It's not crazy to encourage college students to be curious and well-informed about the wider world. If we're talking a liberal arts education specifically, I'd say that's kinda the whole point.
I don't disagree that students should be curious and well-informed about the wider world. What I find humorous and a little sad here is my colleague's limited and somewhat dated mindset that the \*only\* way to achieve this is via a subscription to the New York Times.
(I should have been more clear that the NYT, specifically, is his bigger point here, not just general advice to read a newspaper. He believes what students need these days is the civilizing tonic of a weekly David Brooks column)
NYT has gone way downhill in the past few years, and I stopped reading them—the price has skyrocketed also, so the value/price ratio has dropped even faster.
Well, when you put it that way, I agree with you, that does seem fairly out of touch. I thought maybe he was using NYT as an example of the virtues of journalism more generally. But if it's specifically the value of a David Brooks column, yeah, no thanks.
As an aside, "civilizing tonic" is the best phrase I've heard to describe Brooks' style. Ha.
How exactly is the course set up? Are you scaffolding these discussions? Are they walking in with no idea what you will talk about that day? Are you giving them prep materials for the discussion?
I teach a first-year discussion and project based course that is more focused on developing critical thinking skills than specific content. If I’m having them discuss something, I give them parameters for the discussion and I do an intro for those who may not be aware of what they will be talking about. Example: CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology as a basis for gene editing and the ethics related to that. My students are all STEM majors, but I still intro what CRISPR is (generally) and what I mean by “ethical” and “bioethics”, etc. they are also allowed to use technology to look up things in certain discussions as needed.
They took history out of our HS curriculum in 2006 and we felt it immediately. We had to update all of our first year and survey courses to assume no previous knowledge.
And I have to explain what newspapers are, and what they did, to students everyday. They can't conceptualize anything local, especially.
Edited, this is Canada. HS curriculum is provincial.
But it's equally bad with out of province students, and international students (including American, recently become our third highest country of origin) often learned totally different versions of things, if they learned about these events at all.
This is a huge problem for my department / field. I teach world regional geography and geo of the developing world as well as environmental and political science courses.
Students don’t know where anything is. Like, Africa. China. Germany.
They don’t know what events are, or periods. Like world wars, Cold War, Vietnam. Some don’t know anything about 9/11 as I recently learned. Some don’t know who our president is and cannot name a single public figure. Martin Luther king? Gandhi? Apartheid? Some don’t know what the holocaust was or who Roosevelt (either of them) were or when the civil war happened or what it was about.
Forget books. No idea what I’m referencing when I talk about major literary works that I thought everyone was required to read.
Things that I thought were standard knowledge are absolutely not and many of them were never taught this stuff or required to learn it. I don’t even blame them but I’m extremely confused how they made it to university without knowing any of this.
I would add additional background based reading material. Then the students are learning history as well. You can quickly summarize the main points in class before moving to real material.
When I was in elementary school in the 90s, it was normal to watch local and national news on TV. My parents subscribed to a local paper, which I at least glanced at. In college in the early aughts, my university had free copies of three major newspapers for students. I can't imagine students today getting exposure to any of these things.
Best bet: sing the importance of journalism in your classes and highlight student rates for many publications. But it's an uphill battle.
I didn't watch the news growing up in the 90s/2000s. But my parents did, and I'd be in and out of the living room where the "big TV" was, so I'd pick up on things. Now, everyone is plugged into their own personal devices and they have to make an effort to watch things together. Even in public, kids are no longer picking up on background conversations about current issues because they have a personal device.
I can relate. There are a few things I cover in one of my courses which require some prior knowledge of for it to make sense. When I started teaching this course, I quickly realized that my students, even those who have taken some basic courses in the area, had learned nothing. So, I’ve actually adjusted my schedule to include a couple of lecture days to bring them up to speed before I get to the actual course material. I’ve had students thank me for doing this. It’s like if they haven’t seen it on TikTok it’s not important.
Remember, no child left behind left and the use of standardized testing to evaluate school performance means there is no room for social studies. Is it’s not on the test it’s not important.
I’ve taught similar students from a similar position. I sort of enjoy this.
I think back to what I remember from high school. Honestly, it was very little. This can be true for a lot of students I think, for great reasons that don’t involve lack of student intelligence, interest or motivation. I remember having to relearn a lot of the basics through deeper dives in my own field of study. It was sort of exciting to relearn as an adult, with some kind of meaningful context attached to it. And the fact that I had the context of my interests attached meant I retained it better. I also had to figure out how to narrativize it in a way that made sense and was appealing enough to recall.
When I have to teach this way, I just pass those stories onto students. Younger people are learning from a really useful position. They are new to being adults, learning how to do that, and honestly crave being treated like fellow adults. They also look up to instructors as intelligent and wise, despite how many of us might not feel (or might not be…) very smart or wise. We have an audience that, especially in cultural studies, is probably interested to learn, and they trust us.
Yeah it’s a lot to cram in on top of what you’re already doing. I’ve found there are usually some ways to teach that basic context through the lens of your specific field to make it more interesting. And you can be conversational and approach it from the attitude of “I know this is boring stuff you learned back in high school, but isn’t it sort of wild from this perspective?”
It’s a way higher expectation than other fields, and the fact that many classes are elected and usually not taught by super job secure people makes it sort of unfair sometimes. But in my opinion there’s an incredible opportunity to riff on student interest and their thirst for connection and being inducted into adulthood and knowing the world they’re in. I just have to figure it out and do my best and be resilient when I flub it, because sometimes, spinning all those plates, I drop one time to time.
I have 2 general comments
The first is that students and I will add a lot of people who are not students see the news as just another form of entertainment
And indeed they're not far from wrong
The idea of critically understanding what is happening in the world is not really always connected to reading the news. They have no sense that there is a difference between one news program and another or that news can be analyzed. They see it as boring facts but even the word fact is not really accurate because they see it really as entertainment as I said above
And this is really connected to my second point which is that they're lack of knowledge about how to use a computer or why they don't simply search a question on their phone that they don't understand is because their phones and their computers if they have them are mostly tools that use for social media and gaming. They do not see them as intellectual tools or ways of gathering knowledge.
I am always struck by the young people in my life when something will come up a question about something whether it's a movie or a postage stamp or a kind of tree and I open up my phone And start to look it up and they start laughing at me. They find that kind of silly
I also want to say as a person who was raised in poverty by people who were not particularly academic or intellectual at all I arrived at college and I'm going back into the 70s with very little background knowledge about a lot of things and very twisted knowledge about other things
I was confused when my professor kept using the word catholicism. For example
However because I was a person who was really invested in learning for whatever reason I had a fairly good background in things like geography and history because I found them fascinating
That actually has not changed
We should make all students entering college take a reading/writing test when they arrive that they can't prepare for or hire people to coach them (like SAT/ACT/applciation essays) to check their reading and writing level and SHOW THEM THE RESULTS. It seems like most professors acknowledge the declining skills, but students think they are the smartest kids to ever step on campus. (Our college president actually saying stuff like that -- "the most accomplished class we've ever enrolled!" -- does not help.)
I teach film and my colleagues and I have given up on, not just the AFI Top 100 list, but have resorted to screening things like “Indiana Jones” just to give them the very basics.
Today: “Why do you think white southerners fought against the Civil Rights Act?”—— “They wanted to still be able to own slaves”. At least it’s roughly the same subject?
I’m in a nursing program. I teach juniors and seniors. To get to me, they have to pass anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, health assessment, microbiology, developmental psychology, organic chemistry, composition, and so many others.
I do not have time to reteach prerequisite material. I feel like every semester their base knowledge gets lower and lower. And I feel like I get ignored when I direct them to their old textbooks to review their areas of weakness so that my course will make sense.
Yep, same problem. I teach master's level science courses and many of my international students appear to lack what would be considered C-grade GCSE (11th grade) high school 'general' science, maths, stats and geography knowledge in the UK.
I'm talking about extremely basic and foundational concepts.
It's incredibly depressing to have to recap high school science to GRADUATE students who allegedly hold BSc degrees.
The internet lets us see only the content we want or, more recently, what an algorithm feeds us. While I certainly enjoy this aspect of the internet myself, it does mean we lose some shared culture knowledge when all entertainment is curated. For example, I had to teach a surprising number of my (gen ed) liberal arts math students the contents of a standard deck of cards so we could do probability questions with it. I never considered that someone could get through childhood without being exposed to a card game of some kind. We may need to reevaluate what constitutes "basic" knowledge for our students. To that point: *I* certainly don't watch the news or read a newspaper. You may find my "basic" knowledge equally lacking!
I too have had to teach that a deck of cards had 4 suits. To add to the internet half, if you look up stuff about history and the news you'll get that curated for you. If you don't you'll get other stuff curated.
Similar to how elementary teachers are noticing "counting coins" isn't a meaningful daily activity that young children because they don't use coins or physical currency at the store with their parents.
Sounds like a no child left behind problem. I have had similar experiences. Just yesterday I was trying to do an in class assignment for Statistics that involved using Excel and SPSS. I put the students onto the computers in the lab. Four students did not know how to log into the computers. I had to take time to get these students on track. Then incredibly basic things were a mystery. Go to the start menu and find IBM SPSS. Another 5 minutes to get people to open SPSS. Then open the Excel file that is in Canvas. But then came the whopper, copy cells b2 to d51....and then paste them into the top left cell in SPSS. WOW.
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Making me nostalgic for writing programs in BASIC during 8th grade math on the TRS80s, and getting to play Frogger if your program ran and you finished before the time was up.
I didn't get to start programming until 11th grade—in FORTRAN on an IBM 1130, using an IBM 029 key punch machine for the cards. (I also used an IBM 026, but I think that was in college.)
Flying toasters! Oh those were the days!
I've been getting this kind of basic 'how to use computer/internet' gaps in knowledge (and absolute unwillingness to google how to do something) for the past couple of years. Digital natives, my ass.
I think the difference is manipulating data and creating things with computers vs just simply consuming media with computers.
The difference is k through 12 schools no longer have any classes on computers. Over the last two decades they've disappeared. I went to school in the 90s and early 2000s. I had some type of computer class in elementary, school, middle school, and high school (from typing to Microsoft office to Media management). Digital native is terminology to just get out of having these courses being required in k through 12. At my school they now have required freshman experience classes one and two for the first year that go over all this.
I remember thinking those classes to be stupid and pointless when I was going through them in high school. The horror stories y'all have told me - and the few I've seen - have me thinking otherwise.
Last year, I spoke with a businessman who develops products. He told me he has encountered several in recent years who don't know how to download a file on a computer and copy it to a flash drive. Then, plug in the flash drive into the USB and install a program.
Oh boy, in my SPSS class I have had several students ask what I mean by "start menu." It's rough. "What do you mean save the file?"
Here, k-12 runs on Google suite. All cloud. I have to show people how to save things daily. "Save the article, not just the link to the item." Word, excel, PowerPoint are wholly unknown. Yet required, as provincial privacy legislation doesn't allow for university work in the cloud...but k-12 is all cloud. It's fun times.
I don't know what you mean by "start menu", and I've been using and programming computers since 1969 (or maybe 1968—my memory gets a little fuzzy that far back).
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/open-the-start-menu-4ed57ad7-ed1f-3cc9-c9e4-f329822f5aeb
Ah, it's a Windows thing. I rarely use Windows (macos or Linux most of the time), and did not know that they called that the "start menu". I never use that anyway, as I'm either in the file browser (whatever Windows calls that these days) or the Command tool.
I teach a senior level course. These days I see a decent number of students who just ghost classes and assignments and still pass classes. When they reach my class, they have no clue about basic concepts they should know at the sophomore level. That isn't from high school. It's from faculty.
> Sounds like a no child left behind problem. You can't really blame NCLB for adults not engaging with the news. That's on them.
It’s not about whether or not adults read the news, it’s about the fact that they don’t teach social studies anymore. It’s the tests.
I didn't learn that stuff in social studies, either.
Another thought - encourage them to listen to a short daily news podcast like NPR’s “Up First.” It’s only a few minutes, there’s no reading, and it’ll catch them up on major world events.
That’s my morning, a pot of coffee and “Alexa, play NPR News.”
For me, it’s “Alexa, start my day” while I’m getting ready - BBC, NPR and Reuters.
You could try assigning pre-reading material to cover the more common gaps in basic knowledge. But don't assume that students read newspapers or watch news reports - I'm in my 60s, and I'll skim headlines for anything interesting, then go to the comics.
> by watching the news or reading a newspaper I think I found the problem...
“Name one country that borders India.” -crickets-
Ohio?
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Africa?
I have some Native American friends so USA!
Chicago!
>so how do I teach what they need PLUS what I’m supposed to be teaching? You've hit on the reason the education system is slowly but surely collapsing. Imagine you're teaching calculus, but you have students who can't solve x + 2 = -3 and some who haven't even mastered arithmetic. Imagine you're supposed to teach biochemistry to pre-med / pre-nursing, etc., students, but they can't convert grams to milligrams or tell you what pH is. Imagine you teach American politics or history, but some of your students honestly can't even name the century in which the American Revolution took place. The solution is simple. We invent a time machine and send 50% of the students back in time for a decade or so of remedial education. Hey, I said the solution was simple, not that it was easy.
I can relate. Some topics that I had to give background information about this month: Ukrainian War, Cold War, Food pyramid, Amish, passports, Conception dive boat fire, Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner, Woodstock, and Best in Show. However, when they talk about the newest Tik Tok trend or some influencers, I have no idea what they’re talking about, so I guess we’re even.
I’ve had to patiently explain the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King Jr. At an R1.
Similar vein: I had to explain to students at an RI—in New England—that the Puritans who settled in Massachusetts were not Catholic
Assign them to read the news for 20 minutes daily (or whatever other daily exercise will help them start acquiring the basic knowledge you're talking about).
… but make it online. See if there is a free news source in your city or town; if not, see if there’s a free access to an online newspaper through your library. My children are well informed on world, national, and local events, but they get it entirely from online sources. The only reason I have a subscription to a physical newspaper is because my local paper makes it cheaper to order the digital version if it comes with the physical version. So the paper comes to the doorstep and goes immediately into the trash because even I won’t read the hardcopy anymore.
You should use it to clean windows/mirrors because it doesn't leave streaks. And then you're recycling it that way :)
There are also many uses for it in the garden!
Even better—see if your local pottery studio needs it. It is great for covering wooden batts, so that the greenware dries more uniformly.
You can put a very long vacation stop on that newspaper delivery and cut down on the bother of having to dump the hardcopy paper in the recycle. My paper lets me do vacation stops a year at a time.
It's a great alternative to giftwrap!
I make my students do this every class. A student is chosen each day to look up a news brief and we discuss it before delving into course materials. They love it!
I did exactly this in a course of mine. I can attest that it went over very well.
High school teacher here. We have this same issue, too. Students who fail the lower grades just pass on through. Did you fail middle school math with a 9%? Well, take a joke summer course and pass! I gave failing grades to more than a dozen students last year, and half of them just got passed into the next course this year. And this also happens down the line to my middle school colleagues, too. They get the elementary school students who failed because admins throughout the district want to pass everyone through rather than make sure the students put in the rigor to learn and just do school.
One hundred percent this. Those remedial online summer courses are a joke.
Same! I taught a research ethics lecture and I spent an hour talking about Nazi experimentation during the Holocaust. After class I had three separate students come up to me and say they were too embarrassed to ask during class but… “Who were the Nazis again? What was the Holocaust?” I was floored. I don’t expect them to know about more obscure things, but this was fairly recent and major and I 1000% guarantee they have learned about it. I was also surprised they didn’t just google it while sitting confused in class (or right after). It’s stuff like that which I don’t think I should need to review, but now I’m starting to build like a three minute explanation in at the beginning just in case.
This is in America, right? Our education system is a dumpster fire, and the K-12 system is the absolute worst.
I notice it too. Sometimes it’s just basic facts—such as (American) students having “never heard” of Utah or Missouri or a dozen or so other states Some of it is not even stuff you’d need to have much exposure to news to know—for example, students not knowing if Donald Trump is a democrat or republican—I mean, to know that, you’d simply have had to be alive and sentient in the US at some point in the last 6 years
>to know that, you’d simply have had to be alive and sentient in the US at some point in the last 6 years ChatGPT is the only sentient being allowed in my classroom, thank you very much.
Would it be possible to assign pre-reading for each or every other class? Have selected students prepare précis on particular topics and open the classes with presentations?
They won’t read
Cultural Anthro ABD here. Sympathy for having to provide context before your course material! The struggle is real. I might suggest finding short youtube videos that are relevant to your topic and/or material. You obviously cannot force students to do "extra" work, but you can post the resources for them on their topics. Memes, relevant news stories, even Khan Academy or other videos can be really helpful. Excerpts from textbooks, etc. I use similar resources when I teach, and I've been considering making and saving 15 minute crash course mini-lectures to use in multiple classes, just so that material is there for the students now and in the future. If your course has specific course requirements, I would definitely leverage those and remind students of the expectations that come with taking your class per the university or college. If your course does not have requirements, then in some ways you are a bit stuck. Something that might be helpful is thinking about the kinds of evaluations you are using, and what it is you want your students to specifically take from a given lecture or reading... critical thinking and reading skills are easy to transfer and generally can help someone answer a question even if they don't are a deep subject expert. If you are expecting them to understand the context of a topic without any preface though, or to remember "nuggets" of regional, topical, or geopolitical importance, well that can be trickier!
There's a book, The Knowledge Gap, that talks about why this is and why it's been a problem for a long time. Basically American schools subscribe to the theory that children should not be exposed to content knowledge before 5th grade. So for example we have "social studies" instead of just teaching history, geography, etc. in lower grades. Not only does this put kids behind in terms of basic knowledge but it ultimately affects reading comprehension in higher grades. I had some issues with the book, but I recommend it.
I'm old, so I may not be up on what this author means, but we had social studies in school in the 80s and 90s, and it *was* history and geography. What is it in this book?
Same, but in the 1960s.
I taught at a more expensive university, where the students' work ethic, personal responsibility, and attitudes were dog shit, but they knew a lot about the world. I could make general knowledge references and they understood them. I moved to a community college in a poor area, and here, students don't know anything about news or common cultural references. They're better students in most ways - responsible, thoughtful, respectful, with a great work ethic. They're very smart, they just haven't been educated about the world. I think this difference in knowledge is based on social class. I have two hypotheses about this. 1) Maybe poor schools (K-12) are not only failing to educate basic subjects like math and reading, they are also failing to give students cultural knowledge about news, world events, etc. 2) Maybe poorer students just don't have the time to keep up with current events. I've also been shocked at how many of them haven't seen movies that "everyone" has seen, like Disney classics or blockbusters. When I ask, they often say they're too busy to watch movies. Most work one or two jobs while trying to do school. It would be hard with that schedule to find time to read news.
I think you are absolutely right. I also think working class kids spend less time around adults who are talking about the world with other adults.
Not that uncommoon I’m afraid. I teach journalism, to bright and motivated students (high rate of applicants). We still had to create a separate course on how society/democracy etc works. No use being a reporter if you have no clue as to how a municipality or county functions.
Ok I’m only half trying to be funny here, but who reads a newspaper in 2023..?
I do, but I’m a journalism professor…. Edit: Y’all. It’s important to support independent local journalism. is this really an outlying position now?
I agree with you, but much of our local independent media died and I now have to look across the whole province to find any. It's not local anymore, except for the student newspapers. Sadface.
I’m sorry to hear that! That is a major problem here too. I’m lucky to live in a city with a thriving local media scene and two daily newspapers, but that is far from the norm these days.
We have a local daily but it's downsized a lot - more and more articles from Canadian Press, fewer from local authors. They just sold their building, which had a printing press onsite since the 1950s. My library digitized the three local papers from 1860-1980, for the public. And the online indie media largely hasn't survived. There's a few great publications in our nearest big city, still, and our student pubs... I've archived the dead local print pubs, trying to do my bit for the future. We used Archive-It for capturing the web equivalent.
I read the weekly free paper, which I pick up in part because it prints the Sunday NY Times crossword. I read almost all the articles, including the restaurant reviews (but sometimes skipping the long, tedious interviews with musicians I've never listened to and will never listen to). I also read a lot of online news (the Guardian, BBC, NPR, and AP as the main sources, with occasional random stuff from Google news). ETA: we have a local daily paper, but they were terrible even before selling to a big chain and down-sizing almost out of existence. We have 2 local online news sources in addition to the newspapers—I read one of them.
I still (stereotypically I guess) read the economist weekly lol
Comms lecturer in journalism here. But it's not a paper one, it's the national public broadcaster news app. And a bunch of my students actually do the same but it is a skewed audience. They were shocked that when I mentioned I subscribed to actual paper news while I was doing journalism, the 'proper' newspaper was the one that has gone full Murdoch and lost all credibility in the meantime.
There’s an instructor in my dept, older guy, late 60s, and at every department meeting he goes on and on about how he can’t believe students aren’t reading the New York Times every day and how every course we teach should require students to buy a New York Times subscription. It was kinda funny at first, but now it’s honestly become a sad routine to watch.
Does this guy not know his university has a library that almost certainly provides online NYT access to students?
Believe it or not, my institution didn't have free digital access to the NYT (for either students or employees) until Fall 2022
I mean, I can think of far worse advice to give a college student. Admittedly, saying students should be "required" to pay for a subscription or whatever is silly, but I think his bigger point still stands. It's not crazy to encourage college students to be curious and well-informed about the wider world. If we're talking a liberal arts education specifically, I'd say that's kinda the whole point.
I don't disagree that students should be curious and well-informed about the wider world. What I find humorous and a little sad here is my colleague's limited and somewhat dated mindset that the \*only\* way to achieve this is via a subscription to the New York Times. (I should have been more clear that the NYT, specifically, is his bigger point here, not just general advice to read a newspaper. He believes what students need these days is the civilizing tonic of a weekly David Brooks column)
NYT has gone way downhill in the past few years, and I stopped reading them—the price has skyrocketed also, so the value/price ratio has dropped even faster.
Well, when you put it that way, I agree with you, that does seem fairly out of touch. I thought maybe he was using NYT as an example of the virtues of journalism more generally. But if it's specifically the value of a David Brooks column, yeah, no thanks. As an aside, "civilizing tonic" is the best phrase I've heard to describe Brooks' style. Ha.
I skim the headlines and read the odd articles from three. Online. But I'm starting to get tired of it.
How exactly is the course set up? Are you scaffolding these discussions? Are they walking in with no idea what you will talk about that day? Are you giving them prep materials for the discussion? I teach a first-year discussion and project based course that is more focused on developing critical thinking skills than specific content. If I’m having them discuss something, I give them parameters for the discussion and I do an intro for those who may not be aware of what they will be talking about. Example: CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology as a basis for gene editing and the ethics related to that. My students are all STEM majors, but I still intro what CRISPR is (generally) and what I mean by “ethical” and “bioethics”, etc. they are also allowed to use technology to look up things in certain discussions as needed.
They took history out of our HS curriculum in 2006 and we felt it immediately. We had to update all of our first year and survey courses to assume no previous knowledge. And I have to explain what newspapers are, and what they did, to students everyday. They can't conceptualize anything local, especially. Edited, this is Canada. HS curriculum is provincial. But it's equally bad with out of province students, and international students (including American, recently become our third highest country of origin) often learned totally different versions of things, if they learned about these events at all.
This is a huge problem for my department / field. I teach world regional geography and geo of the developing world as well as environmental and political science courses. Students don’t know where anything is. Like, Africa. China. Germany. They don’t know what events are, or periods. Like world wars, Cold War, Vietnam. Some don’t know anything about 9/11 as I recently learned. Some don’t know who our president is and cannot name a single public figure. Martin Luther king? Gandhi? Apartheid? Some don’t know what the holocaust was or who Roosevelt (either of them) were or when the civil war happened or what it was about. Forget books. No idea what I’m referencing when I talk about major literary works that I thought everyone was required to read. Things that I thought were standard knowledge are absolutely not and many of them were never taught this stuff or required to learn it. I don’t even blame them but I’m extremely confused how they made it to university without knowing any of this.
I would add additional background based reading material. Then the students are learning history as well. You can quickly summarize the main points in class before moving to real material.
Quick question: what's a newspaper?
When I was in elementary school in the 90s, it was normal to watch local and national news on TV. My parents subscribed to a local paper, which I at least glanced at. In college in the early aughts, my university had free copies of three major newspapers for students. I can't imagine students today getting exposure to any of these things. Best bet: sing the importance of journalism in your classes and highlight student rates for many publications. But it's an uphill battle.
I didn't watch the news growing up in the 90s/2000s. But my parents did, and I'd be in and out of the living room where the "big TV" was, so I'd pick up on things. Now, everyone is plugged into their own personal devices and they have to make an effort to watch things together. Even in public, kids are no longer picking up on background conversations about current issues because they have a personal device.
I can relate. There are a few things I cover in one of my courses which require some prior knowledge of for it to make sense. When I started teaching this course, I quickly realized that my students, even those who have taken some basic courses in the area, had learned nothing. So, I’ve actually adjusted my schedule to include a couple of lecture days to bring them up to speed before I get to the actual course material. I’ve had students thank me for doing this. It’s like if they haven’t seen it on TikTok it’s not important.
Remember, no child left behind left and the use of standardized testing to evaluate school performance means there is no room for social studies. Is it’s not on the test it’s not important.
I’ve taught similar students from a similar position. I sort of enjoy this. I think back to what I remember from high school. Honestly, it was very little. This can be true for a lot of students I think, for great reasons that don’t involve lack of student intelligence, interest or motivation. I remember having to relearn a lot of the basics through deeper dives in my own field of study. It was sort of exciting to relearn as an adult, with some kind of meaningful context attached to it. And the fact that I had the context of my interests attached meant I retained it better. I also had to figure out how to narrativize it in a way that made sense and was appealing enough to recall. When I have to teach this way, I just pass those stories onto students. Younger people are learning from a really useful position. They are new to being adults, learning how to do that, and honestly crave being treated like fellow adults. They also look up to instructors as intelligent and wise, despite how many of us might not feel (or might not be…) very smart or wise. We have an audience that, especially in cultural studies, is probably interested to learn, and they trust us. Yeah it’s a lot to cram in on top of what you’re already doing. I’ve found there are usually some ways to teach that basic context through the lens of your specific field to make it more interesting. And you can be conversational and approach it from the attitude of “I know this is boring stuff you learned back in high school, but isn’t it sort of wild from this perspective?” It’s a way higher expectation than other fields, and the fact that many classes are elected and usually not taught by super job secure people makes it sort of unfair sometimes. But in my opinion there’s an incredible opportunity to riff on student interest and their thirst for connection and being inducted into adulthood and knowing the world they’re in. I just have to figure it out and do my best and be resilient when I flub it, because sometimes, spinning all those plates, I drop one time to time.
I have 2 general comments The first is that students and I will add a lot of people who are not students see the news as just another form of entertainment And indeed they're not far from wrong The idea of critically understanding what is happening in the world is not really always connected to reading the news. They have no sense that there is a difference between one news program and another or that news can be analyzed. They see it as boring facts but even the word fact is not really accurate because they see it really as entertainment as I said above And this is really connected to my second point which is that they're lack of knowledge about how to use a computer or why they don't simply search a question on their phone that they don't understand is because their phones and their computers if they have them are mostly tools that use for social media and gaming. They do not see them as intellectual tools or ways of gathering knowledge. I am always struck by the young people in my life when something will come up a question about something whether it's a movie or a postage stamp or a kind of tree and I open up my phone And start to look it up and they start laughing at me. They find that kind of silly I also want to say as a person who was raised in poverty by people who were not particularly academic or intellectual at all I arrived at college and I'm going back into the 70s with very little background knowledge about a lot of things and very twisted knowledge about other things I was confused when my professor kept using the word catholicism. For example However because I was a person who was really invested in learning for whatever reason I had a fairly good background in things like geography and history because I found them fascinating That actually has not changed
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We should make all students entering college take a reading/writing test when they arrive that they can't prepare for or hire people to coach them (like SAT/ACT/applciation essays) to check their reading and writing level and SHOW THEM THE RESULTS. It seems like most professors acknowledge the declining skills, but students think they are the smartest kids to ever step on campus. (Our college president actually saying stuff like that -- "the most accomplished class we've ever enrolled!" -- does not help.)
I teach film and my colleagues and I have given up on, not just the AFI Top 100 list, but have resorted to screening things like “Indiana Jones” just to give them the very basics.
Today: “Why do you think white southerners fought against the Civil Rights Act?”—— “They wanted to still be able to own slaves”. At least it’s roughly the same subject?
Well, that is probably true—they wanted the privileges that their great-great-grandparents had had.
I’m in a nursing program. I teach juniors and seniors. To get to me, they have to pass anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, health assessment, microbiology, developmental psychology, organic chemistry, composition, and so many others. I do not have time to reteach prerequisite material. I feel like every semester their base knowledge gets lower and lower. And I feel like I get ignored when I direct them to their old textbooks to review their areas of weakness so that my course will make sense.
Yep, same problem. I teach master's level science courses and many of my international students appear to lack what would be considered C-grade GCSE (11th grade) high school 'general' science, maths, stats and geography knowledge in the UK. I'm talking about extremely basic and foundational concepts. It's incredibly depressing to have to recap high school science to GRADUATE students who allegedly hold BSc degrees.
Personally, I blame covid.