Saturday, January 30, 2010

Michael Wesch: A Vision of Students Today

I am an avid reader. Give me a mystery, a romance, a sports story, or an adventure novel and I will read until my eyes are gritty. I read at red lights. I can read while the world is churning around me. But hand me a textbook and I will do chores around the house to get out of reading it. The students in this video state that they completed 49% of their assigned readings, and only 26% were relevant to their lives. Yet they pay $100 for this unopened text. In my first go around of college, I was too afraid to NOT purchase the texts, though the odds were that I would not open them. I was a P.E. major at first and the books that contained the sports and the activities I still have because I teach and can at times find something new for my students to do. These texts are from around 1994. The other texts were sold back as soon as possible. So I have experienced some of the examples that were shown in the video.

I would add to the video a comparison of statistics of younger, more traditional students to those of students who are older, returning students. I can guarantee that if I buy a textbook now, I will read it. If I pay for a class now, I will attend it. I believe the stats would differ in those areas and probably in the areas of where hours are spent. I thought the statistics were interesting as they were given and really did not surprise me at all.

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