The Mindset of the Incoming College Freshmen 383
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."
"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:0, Insightful)
Ah, the young white trash generation.
Seinfeld is "classic TV"... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, please, stay on my lawn... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Tatoos and $$ (Score:1, Insightful)
If I was a doctor Id get into tattoo removal asap. These gen Y peeps and their fugly tats will be running to the doctors office when they hit middle age.
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:5, Insightful)
off the top (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:2, Insightful)
Lol at this retort to a "white trash generation" claim.
Fucked? Hell no! Not yet at least... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:We're Fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
I quote, "What's wrong withe status quo? It works for me!"
Argh.
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sorry buddy, but Slayer is no better than rap (Score:0, Insightful)
And then there's white trash like you who listen to Slayer.
WHAT THE FUCK (Score:2, Insightful)
From my generation to yours... (Score:0, Insightful)
I'm not sure why this isn't in the Idle section, or if this is "News" or a giant troll, if it isn't then you old timers are the real disappointment.
If it is a troll, then I fell for this bait but I had to let his out...
Let's go through a few of these...
"They have never used a card catalog to find a book." Yes, let's NOT use the advancements in databases and instant relational lookups....
"They have never had to âoeshake downâ an oral thermometer." Yes, please go back to using toxic mercury for nostalgia's sake.
"Rap music has always been main stream." So? We never stopped you from listening to whatever music you grew up with, quit being condescending on our childhood.
"Amateur radio operators have never needed to know Morse code." Should we know smoke signals as well?
"Someone has always been asking: âoeWas Iraq worth a war?â" Yea, I'm sure Vietnam wasn't an issue when you guys were going through college through the Hippy years.
"Migration of once independent media like radio, TV, videos and compact discs to the computer has never amazed them." You can't blame us for this, it's not our fault advances happened so rapidly in our times, whereas going from Mono to Stereo was the big thing in yours...
Your nostalgia's great and all, it just gets damned annoying when it starts being condescending....
I shall part with the following from your generation...
"UP YOURS!"
Re:WHAT THE FUCK (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
Re:1984 much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. The only things I could really relate to were the bits about chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, GDP, and Blue Jello.
Honestly, this is basically a list of things to assume about the class of 2013 that you can bring out in conversation to insult their knowledge of history.
Re:Sorry (Score:1, Insightful)
I think the point is that to these kids Britney Spears is old music, something that happened before they were teenagers.
The President Has Never Inhaled (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> "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.
Cynical observations for the current generation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No, please, stay on my lawn... (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed it is.
Re:1984 much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We're Fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:What exactly is the author trying to convey? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sorry buddy, but Slayer is no better than rap (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:My conclusion.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Afghanistan - same situation, lots of areas above 10,000 feet mean it's colder than most people here assume. When they hear the stories about the Taliban or Al Quaida hiding in caves in the mountains, they believe them uncriticially, but the real situation involves many regions with incredibly dangerous winters, sometimes altitiudes and temperature combinations where most people cannot adapt, but simply weaken and die from long term exposure, and vast distances that must be crossed to to bring in water. There are serious reasons to doubt that many people can lay up in most of that terrain long term. There are places no one is desperate enough to try and farm, and anybody up that way is on the lam from someone. Either the government as a whole knows this and could narrow its searches for people such as Osama considerably, or they aren't listening to their geography experts at the CIA.
For someone who seems to know a lot about the mountains you seem to know fuck all about how hard it is to find someone in the mountains let alone someone hiding in the mountains who doesn't want to be found.
Re:Cynical observations for the current generation (Score:2, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, there have always been homeless people since there have been people. There are homeless people in French cities too. What's your point?
Source?
There was a time when all frontier towns were tent cities.
The government paid welfare from 1929 until the present. Somehow, the nation and its people survived from inception to 1929. I wonder how?
Corporate annuities were seldom a good deal, and few people lived long enough to be retired. 20+ year retirements are now common.
That's right! people just died.
Source? The United States is still the world's largest manufacturer.
College education at elite private schools is free when there is need. Families that earn $120,000 to $180,000 are only asked to pay 10% of their income for tuition, room, board, and fees.
Re:No, please, stay on my lawn... (Score:3, Insightful)
I was under the impression that pretty much any compiler on earth would end up reducing x = x + 1 or x += 1 back down the same opcodes as x++. They do a decent amount of optimizations on the code before compiling.
Not that I CAN'T use the old x = x + 1 method (my first language was BASIC on a Commodore 64, so I used that a lot), nor do I even know Python, but IMHO just using ++ is much faster when coding. I'm a bit of a curmudgeon though. In general anything that strays from C-link syntax I just don't like too much. Like I said I learned on BASIC, and have also dabbled with Fortran quite a bit, but after I learned C and C++ in college it just seemed the "right" way to do things. These days I'm doing more in C# and PHP, but their syntax is still very C-ish.
Still, sometime in the next year or two I do want to TRY to learn Ruby.
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:2, Insightful)
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".
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I must be young at heart (Score:3, Insightful)
Born in the 80s?
No, you are still young in body. But that's OK.
As we get older, we're supposed to get wiser, but in fact as I get older I don't see most of my peers changing much at all. They were closed minded, ignorant,and obstreperously intolerant youths, and they're aging into closed minded, ignorant and obstreperously intolerant elders. The world moves past them; it changes and they don't change with it. They're too picky about who they learn from to learn much at all. As youths, they see the experiences of their elders as belonging to an irrelevant, bygone age. As elders, they've become certain that every thought worth having must have already passed through their heads.
Here's a test: if as a young person you can and do have friends older than yourself, chances are you'll have young friends when you are older. That's a nice thing when your old friends start to die, but just as importantly it means you'll probably keep learning things as you get older. Young people who think they can't learn anything from their elders are right, but they don't realize that's because they're already rotting from the head down. Sooner or later they'll become exactly the kind of old fogey they despise, because they've already got the attitude. All they need is a few decades.
Re:1984 much? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why not something more meaningful like
40% of all wealth has always been owned by 10% of the people (Now its up to 50%).
The earth has always been doomed by rising temperature.
Or maybe we could just go with
The American dream has always been fucked
These some how seem more interesting than missing Saved by The Bell