<p>Watch out… Before too long, you’ll be saying they all need haircuts and you hate their music…</p>
<p>Oh gosh, I laughed so hard. Seriously? These whippersnappers are annoying you and you imagine you will start some argument by calling out parents on CC? Honey, we already know what we’ve done wrong, and what we’ve done right – what is our “fault” and what is not. It must have been a shock to you, but it isn’t to us.</p>
<p>My children, and their friends, are awesome, wonderful, gregarious, stupid, indolent, compassionate, hilarious, adventurous, oblivious, young, stressed, clueless and goodness knows they will improve with time. Or not. As I tell my kindergarteners, you take care of yourself and let other people worry about themselves. At the end of the day, none of us are all that we might be, but the trick is to get up and try it again tomorrow.</p>
<p>It’s so easy to blame the parents - until you become one.</p>
<p>Back in the last century, I knew a whole bunch of people who dropped out of engineering at Iowa State because it was “boring” or “not what they expected” or “too hard”. For engineering programs, what you describe is absolutely not news.</p>
<p>Re “what is wrong with your kids:”</p>
<p>As you are evidently so much older and wiser than your classmates, surely you’ve figured out by now that you should not be paying attention to what they do, only to what you yourself are doing. Why do you care? If anything, you should be happy that other less mature students are self-sabotaging so you can perform better by comparison.</p>
<p>Regarding changing majors: if you knew what you wanted to do with your life when you were 19, why are you back in school now? Seems kind of hypocritical to criticize younger students for deciding that a certain path isn’t for them instead of wasting time and money on it.</p>
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<p>I blame reality, for being so hard to deal with.</p>
<p>I agree that it’s disrespectful for students to be “multitasking” on phones and laptops during class. I doubt this helps their grades. If I’m paying for my kids to go to college, I want them to get the most out of the academics–and that includes paying attention to “boring” lectures. IMO kids today have much shorter attention spans, and less patience for anything with “low entertainment value.” Their world is not at all the world I grew up in, and I can’t do anything to change that.</p>
<p>(Plenty wrong with my kids. Yes, I know my freshman S was skyping his little sis during class.<br>
And please don’t ask me about those spring break photos of senior D. . . but all I can do now as a parent is “disapprove.”)</p>
<p>“Who in the world would waste their time zoning out on social media?” said all of us.</p>
<p>Let’s see–these kids you dislike so much figured out in one semester that they didn’t like engineering but it took you how many years to figure out you didn’t like your chosen profession? Who has the problem here?</p>
<p>“I would honestly rather these students give up and switch majors now than three semesters from now when they realize they are utterly ill-suited to Engineering.” </p>
<p>Same here. I say that as a parent of a kid that dropped out of engineering college… twice, with a year of Walmart and a decent summer session (on own dime) in between. A few years later things clicked with another major.</p>
<p>Wow, there are some REALLY defensive people here.</p>
<p>My daughters had the same frustration in classes. </p>
<p>Some kids are pressured by their parents to go to college and/or majors and don’t really want to be there. I remember back in my day at Ithaca College, there were a lot of students biding their time and doing well in classwasn’t part of the “experience” they were looking for. </p>
<p>Other kids were the big fish in the small ponds of their high schools, and now that they are surrounded by equally or more intelligent peers, they have difficulty coping and/or keeping up. Not being used to having to study and work hard for grades, it is easy to give up and quit in frustration.</p>
<p>It’s probably because your school accepts the vast majority of applicants, so the majority of your classmates are likely just the kids who just got an average score on the SAT, lack any sort of study habits, and are just going to college so they can party. I really doubt most of the sons and daughters of CC’s parents are actually like that.</p>
<p>I find this post almost as offensive as the original. Excuse those of us who are parents of average kids who don’t score 2400 on the SAT and go to Ivy league schools. I didn’t realize this was such an elite gathering.</p>
<p>OP, if you already have a degree, shouldnt you be in graduate school?
You sound pretty bitter.</p>
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<p>Yeah, kids never did that in our day. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>The kids are probably doing most of their studying on the weekend.</p>
<p>Don’t worry, OP. someday those young upstarts will grow up and some will be just like YOU.</p>
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<p>LOL! Yeah, that’s probably what they’re doing. :D</p>
<p>OP, I’ll give you that they shouldn’t be reading Facebook during lectures. It is disrespectful. Why bother attending lecture if you are going to do that?</p>
<p>In my day (oh my, did I really say that), disinterested students read the newspaper or wrote notes to their friends. Disrespectful clods have shown up in college since there was such as thing as college. The methods may change, but human nature doesn’t.</p>
<p>My oldest has a sinus infection and no time to get to the doctor. Thanks for asking.</p>
<p>Well, I’m older than the OP. A lot older. and a parent. And to some degree, I gotta agree–what goes on in classroom’s now is qualitatively different from classrooms ten or twenty years ago. I’m used to it now, and I am not surprised when things get more, for lack of a better word, weird, each year, but yeah. Your kids are not like you were. Trust me.</p>
<p>But they’re kinda sweet in their own way, anyway.</p>
<p>Dunno if we would have been any different if we had the technology they have today… no one here has ever checked the internet (CC!) from their desk at work during the day when they were supposed to be working? If I’d had the internet in college, and the possibility of spending time on it instead of listening to a lecture - BAM, I’d have been there. Looking back on my college days now with the experience of a 50 year old, I see the reason for getting good grades. But I can also see that some classes and subjects I sat through lectures on were NOT anything I would ever use or care about again.</p>