While grading essays, exams and reports, you may wonder, "Do these morons know anything?"
That's a darn good question.
A political club (unknown denomination) at Texas Tech asks students some questions. Some are about past and current events in the U.S. Celebrity news is the subject of other questions.
I'll put the most positive spin on this as possible. The students correctly answered some of the questions. Here's the video.
The parents and teachers of these students should be so proud. I'd love to see some follow-up interviews with them.
As a historian, I'm weeping at my desk right now.
ReplyDeleteOver and over, students in my general-ed science class show that they can't read, write, or think as well as I could in 6th grade. There's a term for an adult with a mind of a 12-year-old: a MORON.
ReplyDeleteOuch. That was even more painful than I thought it was going to be when I hit play. The Snooki reference reminded me of this old Onion article, from their 'Year in Review - Top howevermany people of 2010" series. I think they nailed it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theonion.com/articles/snooki-just-try-not-to-think-about-who-should-real,18634/
A longtime reader says:
ReplyDeleteYeah...the video is fairly representative of Texas Tech students, on the whole: disproportionately good-looking but not overly troubled by brains. I went to TTU for grad school and, while I met a lot of smart undergrads, the place as a whole suffers from being a fallback option school. If students can't get into UT Austin or A&M, then they end up in Lubbock.
I shouldn't have watched this before going to class today. I really shouldn't have.
ReplyDeleteI'm not at all surprised at this. They are of a generation who are concerned only with knowledge and facts, such as they are, which are of relevance to them. ("The Civil War? Oh, that's my grandpa's history! That's got nothing to do with me!")
ReplyDeleteLook at it this way--who's going to make a better impression when chatting up a potential date in a bar: someone who knows what the Battle of Gettysburg was all about or someone who has an encyclopedic memory about the newest reality TV show?
Is misinformation about the Civil War endemic in the South? I ask this as an escaped Roman Catholic who went to convent school for 11 years. We learned nothing about the Spanish Inquisition. Not that we expected it. . .
ReplyDeleteCRASH!!!!
DeleteNOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!
The judges would accept "the North" and "the south, just not yet."
DeleteI'm told some schools teach students about "the War of Northern Aggression", rather than the Civil War. I'm not sure whether that's much of an excuse, since most Southerners I've met have heard both terms.
DeleteThere's no similar excuse for not knowing the US got its independence from England.
I don't think anyone teaches much about the Spanish Inquisition, and for a while, everything I knew about it came from Monty Python. Then one time I was at some movie set in the Renaissance, and the Inquisitioners showed up part way through the plot. In the middle of someone getting burned at the stake, I suddenly realized that I hadn't been expecting this, and burst out laughing. I think everyone else in the theatre thought I was depraved.
R and/or G, that's priceless. Agreed about the independence thang.
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