I not only teach snowflakes, I live with them. One floor of my apartment building is leased by one of those semester-in-the-big-city organizations, as housing for their students. We've got a fresh crop in town; I saw them walking around, all bright and animated and waving their orientation folders, when I took my recycling down to the loading dock last week. Many of them, apparently, are unaccustomed to apartment living, and are still discovering some basic coping strategies, such as if the smoke detector goes off while you're making a snack (or taking a toke) in the wee hours, open the window, not the hallway door; otherwise, you'll set off the building-wide fire alarm that can only be turned off by the nice firefighters stationed about a mile away. We've been seeing a lot of those firefighters lately, often around 1 a.m.
I'm all for inquiry-based learning, but it's about time they mastered the concept, and moved on to something else (not wandering blindly across intersections while texting might be a good start, since it would keep them alive long enough to learn other things). I've got my own snowflakes, and I prefer to deal with them on a full night of sleep. If this goes on much longer, I'm going to start fantasizing about inviting Strelnikov over to show them the quickest route from the 6th floor to the ground.
My mother always told me, "You know it's going to be a good day when the first story you read for the day ends with fantasizing about defenestration."
ReplyDelete20 year olds are just kinda stupid like that. I will share a story of my own spouse at 20.
ReplyDeleteWe were hanging out cooking something in the apartment kitchen which, due to some really stupid design, included both the door to the outside and the base of the stairs that led to the bedrooms. It was a nice day, the door was wide open.
The pot on the stove boiled over, setting off the smoke alarm at the top of the stairs. Future spouse runs for the alarm and shuts the front door on his way, thus trapping more of the smoke and closing off the easy escape route if things had gone really bad.
We had a nice little sit down about what to do in case of a kitchen fire after that.
Oh, and now? He's a professional cook.
There is a house full of students right across from my house. I won the student lottery because they are all girls, they are clean, they don't party at home, and they have occasionally picked up my mail when I was out of town.
ReplyDeleteNow, they've never been in a class of mine, but I'm betting they'd be good students, too.
I know how lucky I am.
I also live among snowflakes. Next time I move, I'm moving someplace suburban, boring, and uncool.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing worse than running into a snowflake in the exercise room when he's lifting weights. Or clearing the Natty Light cans off my car in the morning.
I'm in a HIP college area. I want to blow my brains out most nights.
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