- Google Fiber Coming to Atlanta, but who knows when [ABC]
- Game Changer: What Google Fiber Means for Atlanta [Decaturish]
- 8 Reasons to Love Avondale Estates [Atlanta Magazine]
- Wrecking Bar to begin canning beer, opens Gwinnett brewery [AJC]
- Microsoft putting “innovation center” in Atlanta Flatiron Building [ABC]
- Waiting for the state to deliver transit dollars to our region [Saporta Report]
- WH Auden’s syllabus will make your college courses look like a piece of cake [NY Daily News]
Map courtesy of Google
That Auden syllabus is crazy. Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, and the Divine Comedy in one semester? Even the Cliff Notes of those three would be too much reading for today’s college students.
In fairness, they had a lot more free time back then. They didn’t have the distractions of cell phones, tv or the interwebs. Hell, they didn’t even have easy access to quality weed. Might as well read.
It’s an insane amount of reading, but the diversity is awesome. Shakespeare, Sophocles, The Education of Henry Adams, Rilke and 9 opera libretti? Please!
It sounds like a weird and amazing book club waiting to happen.
Of course, it was probably expected that students were already familiar with some of the material (at least the Shakespeare) and wouldn’t necessarily have to read it again.
Good point. Do HS students still read Shakespeare?
Yup, and with about as much success as ever. It’s a rare, rare English (I mean Language Arts) teacher who can get teens to even understand the Elizabethan speech of Shakespeare, never mind the meaning. The only exception is perhaps Romeo and Juliet because it involves teens, love, death, drugs, impossible parents.
Yes. Weird and amazing. I’m in, if you set it up. (I have to be allowed to participate via audiobook.)
I think I could use up the rest of my life working through that syllabus.
Or I could re-read Elmore Leonard.
Tough call.
Last year, I read some of the early Western stories for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed them.
And college students were a narrower spectrum of the population–either genuinely academic and interested or rich enough that their parents wanted them there even if they got only gentleman Cs.
Good point about the era. This was a pre- GI Bill, pre- college for everyone syllabus.
Are you suggesting that the democratization of college — for lack of a better term — is what created lower standards? I would think that’s at least partly true. As we have expanded the number of people attending college, it’s become much more of a credential than a true education — freshmen arrive for four years of fun, a little work, and a four-year degree that at least gets their foot in the door for jobs after graduation.
Yes, I think it has. I’ve heard older professors claim that a liberal arts degree is roughly equivalent to a high school diploma from 50 or 60 years ago. On the other hand, some students who would have been qualified back then would not have gotten a college opportunity. Now, by and large, they do.
Re “.. freshmen arrive for four years of fun, a little work, and a four-year degree that at least gets their foot in the door for jobs after graduation.”: let’s admit it folks, that’s been true for awhile, not just for the current generation of college students! Probably since whenever financial aid got big post-WWII and college became the standard path for middle class kids. I still remember when women were accused of just going to college to get their M.R.S. degree. And the only students in the library on a Friday night were the pre-meds and physics majors.
‘Twas ever thus. Prior to the GI bill, post-secondary institutions were populated by plenty of students who were there as a matter of course–to fulfill the expectations of their families and of society, and get their ticket punched for the next stages of their lives.. They just didn’t include many who weren’t economically privileged to begin with.
I think what’s at issue nowadays is the definition of “a little work.” My college career (late ’70s) certainly involved plenty of goofing off along with copious amounts of beer and what-else. But when we studied, we poured it on. The assigned reading reflected in the Auden syllabus would not have been very unusual in upper-level courses at my alma mater, and a normal load was three courses per 10-week term. (We had what they called “trimesters” with no summer session.) You could expect to produce a couple of in-depth research papers per course and take comprehensive midterm and final exams. I distinctly remember an anthropology course in which we had to read a seminal text (often book length) every week and submit a critical review of it. I worked quite hard and was frustrated by the mediocre grade I received, but in re-reading those essays last month was stunned at how much that prof’s critiques improved my writing in ways that echo still. How can anybody learn how to read and think at the same time, and think and write at the same time, if they aren’t being compelled to read a LOT, and think about what they’re reading and write about it in a coherent way?
It may be true that the current generation just doesn’t understand the meaning of real work but we sound so much like my parents that I’m a teeny bit worried about whether this is really a generational effect or just the way older generations always feel. I have to say that I took a few graduate courses as a mid-life adult and worked much harder than I thought I would. I’d gotten used to the workday schedule; the younger students seemed better adjusted to long periods of late nights studying.
Maybe students have just gotten better at working the system. The courses with the workload which STG described certainly existed when I was in college, but I just didn’t take them unless they were absolutely required. For ex., there were multiple anthropology classes offered my multiple professors, so I took the afternoon course from the professor for whom our test bank was most current and complete.
I know, it’s creepy to open your mouth and hear your own parent speaking (at their most irritable and irritating, I might add). But to no small degree, we’re supposed to sound like our parents at this point. Otherwise, whose job is it to be the grown-ups? (This is going to make a lot of people throw tomatoes at my head, but I honestly think one of the reasons so many children and adolescents have such poor command of common sense and common courtesy is that their parents shy way from ‘sounding like their own parents’ and so abdicate their responsibility to correct and teach–which, face it, has to include a lot of nagging and carping.)
“Prior to the GI bill, post-secondary institutions were populated by plenty of students who were there as a matter of course…They just didn’t include many who weren’t economically privileged to begin with.”
And now we have far more reluctant students from both groups, so the universities, for the most part, have had to adapt by lowering standards. At the same time, many students are also taking on huge course loads, to save money and to be done with college as soon as possible. Naturally they gravitate toward the easier courses.
There have always been some students who gravitated toward easier courses (and less rigorous institutions), for a variety of reasons. And I’m sure the classes of 2015 and onward include many earnest, motivated seekers of knowledge who feel like they are working really hard. But what I took from comments early in this thread is that nobody anywhere is undertaking a lit course as demanding as Auden’s. I haven’t looked at a college syllabus in 35 years, so I’m taking others’ word for it.
That syllabus is strongly reminiscent of some I had in college in the ’70s. (I’m confident about this because I skimmed through a crate full of my college material before Christmas.) If it truly differs spectacularly from current norms, that would explain a lot about some baffling experiences I’ve had in recent years with 20-somethings in the workplace. No wonder people balk at being asked to read more than 200 words at a time, regardless of the complexity of the topic. And, I’m sorry to say, an Ivy League degree is no proof against this trend.
“If it truly differs spectacularly…”
Spectacularly would be an understatement.
The college experience, with or without a gap year, has become a cultural norm, maybe even a developmental norm. It’s not just about education, but also the way that 18-22 year olds transition out of the home into the wider world of work and living on their own. I shudder to think what would happen if only the best and the brightest and the most motivated were attending college. What would the rest do? Stay at home–aaargh! Join the revolution? Join the disappearing work force? Join the dwindling military services? Have babies? Increase the baby glut in Decatur?
Make (at least some of ’em).
Speaking of educational standards and norms, what do y’all think of this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/us/states-move-to-make-citizenship-exams-a-classroom-aid.html?ref=us
I once taught a citizenship class on a volunteer basis, and it was very much a teach-to-the-test kind of class. It’s mostly about rote memorization. Though I don’t think it’s a terrible idea to require high school kids to pass the test, I do believe the test itself could be improved. A great honors class would be one that considered what’s on the test and whether it should be or not and what should be instead.
There should be, in my view, more about the nature of our government and society and fewer historical factoids. In preparing for the test, students learn that Ben Franklin created the first public library in the U.S., but they learn nothing about how public libraries are funded now. They learn how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights, but they would be hard-pressed to describe what powers police do and do not have.
Also, though it’s true most native-born Americans struggle to answer questions on the test, almost every immigrant I knew who took the test reported that it was actually quite easy. Of course, they had spent time studying for it, but, still, should it be easy?
Wasn’t there a recent NPR piece in which the storyteller had recently passed the citizenship test but missed the question “Who discovered America?” The answer required was Columbus but the storyteller had answered more correctly that it was the first humans to get here.
How difficult the test should be for aspiring naturalized citizens is a different question. What blows my mind is that (according to the NYT article) a survey last year by the public policy center at Penn revealed that more than a third of American adults could not name a single branch of the U.S. government. These are people who vote and sit on juries.
With respect to the evils of “teaching to the test” — IMO this is a test they should be “teaching to” already and if they’re not, then they need to start. Which probably starts with reallocating some attention and resources back into social studies curriculum.
This map is incorrect.
Google Fiber is not coming to Arizona. Probably because the competitors stepped up and already rolled out fiber in Phoenix. It is already in place from Cox Communications and I believe in some places from the phone company or perhaps another vendor. Google appears to have spurred them into action.
I don’t currently have further information on which of these “potential fiber cities” Google decided not to build, but I’m sure there are others.