One of my jobs involves teaching classes for an internationally recognized certification exam. I teach both in-person and online, and I enjoy teaching the materials and helping people prepare to pass the exam. For me, this certification opened up a lot of doors, connected me with a great network, and in general changed my career for the better. I’m pretty passionate about it, and I try to bring that passion and care to the class.
But man, sometimes, it is hard.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a decline in the care level people place on education. Now, to be fair, education is always a challenge, especially if we’re talking middle or high school education. Many of those kids just don’t want to be there. I don’t measure that engagement. I teach post-secondary classes. My adult students should, theoretically, want to be in class, and place some value on it.
It shocks me how little the modern student cares. As an instructor, I’m full of knowledge about the certification exam, yet most students ask few if any questions about the exam. I’ve then had students that failed the exam say “I wish you would have covered this aspect of the exam…” only to have me send them a link to their class video where I explicitly state “This aspect is really critical and you need to memorize it for the exam.”
In college, I had an electrical engineering instructor that used to work for NASA. He was the guy that designed the carbon dioxide filter for the Apollo 13 mission. If you saw the movie and remember where they made a square filter fit a round hole…yeah, that was him.
Most of the people in my class never asked him any questions. He never volunteered information about his time in NASA, and it wasn’t until the last week of class that I had the opportunity to ask him about his NASA experience. I learned so much in just that short time, and I’m glad I took that opportunity while in college.
We live in an era of information abundance, where gaining knowledge is simply a matter of applying yourself. Gone are the days where knowledge was kept under lock and key, only reserved for the powerful or rich. Yet this abundance has resulted in seemingly dumber students who are not ready to actually work. When you have mechanical engineering graduates who can’t make basic parts on a lathe, you have to wonder what that person did for 4 years in college.
I don’t think its a matter of education availability. The opportunities are there, and they’ve been there since I was a student all the way to today. But whether its laziness, lack of care, or something in the water, our modern students suck.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
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