students

This year has made me wonder whether students are becoming dumber, lazier, or some combination of both. I have been making notes of some or the comments students have made which just make me wonder what is going on (or not going on) in their heads.

When we were looking at Greece we were looking at the philosophers Plato, Socrates and Aristotle along with some of the others. One young man raised his hand and blurted, “Did they invent soccer?” I asked, “What?” He repeated his question, “Did they invent soccer?” I asked, “why would you ask that?” His response, “Whenever I hear about the old Greeks, someone always talks about “soccer tee’s.”

More recently when we were looking at India I showed the movie, “Gandhi.” The movie starts with the assassination of Gandhi, shows his funeral, and then goes back to when he was a young lawyer in South Africa. A girl in the class asked me to stop the dvd because she was confused. So I found the pause button and asked for clarification. She then asked, “Was he just reincarnated?”

In general their vocabulary is more limited than it should be. On the test which had a question about the partition of India and Pakistan, the word “partition” created serious problems for half the class. This despite it being one of the text’s vocabulary words meaning it is printed in dark bold letters followed by the definition. A fifth grade teacher told me it was on the vocabulary test for his kids last week.

This doesn’t include students who can’t remember the US government has a Senate and a House of Representatives, name the States which border Iowa, and sometimes think the Atlantic Ocean is really where the Pacific is located.