As I said, I know a few great CU kids personally. I also know scores of drones. I feel sorry for the motivated, smart kids who are forced to attend CU for one reason or another and have to be in class with the mouth breathers. CU is, at best, an average state school. US News rankings of a year ago suggest that, if dropped into the California, CU would be tied for 8th best school in the state, and there are 22 states with higher ranked schools than CU.

I know CU profs who bemoan the fact that they have to dumb down their classes for the quality of student they get (remember, 80% plus are admitted to CU). I can imagine what it must be like to have 2 million books in the library (not to mention on-line resources and periodicals), and have students say they have to stretch two pages of information to fit ten pages.

CU has very few “amazing” programs. I suppose you’re studying low-energy physics at CU? Tell me, do you know more than the Nobel Laureates with whom you work?

Thought so.

Peter:

I believe you said “insinuate” when you meant “infer,” as in “JS O’Brien inferred certain things from what Lena wrote.” I “insinuated” (or implied) nothing. I came right out and said what I thought. Are you, too, a CU student or grad?

Thought so.

I’d bet my house that’s a standard you don’t live by, hmmmm?

Disclosure – I have a B.A. in English with minors in sociology and economics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (class of ‘87 WOOO!!!! not). No ed-block. No way in hell was I going to teach. (Go ahead and beat me to death on my lack of writing skills – I’ve been programming for over a decade now and am happy to get out an e-mail that is coherent.)

Why did I go there? My mom and step-dad were public school teachers in small-town Nebraska. I got scholarships and financial aid to foot some of the bill, loans for more of it and worked part-time to full-time to graduate in 5 years.

What I learned in my first year at UN-L: My ass would’ve been kicked from here to eternity in a high-caliber private (or even state) school. The incoming freshman from the “city” were so much better prepared for the material than I was, coming from my b-f Nebraska graduating class of 29. I did a lot of catch-up during the first year.

I also learned that no one takes care of you. (If you are me, that is – I had to navigate the financial aid system on my own – no one wrote any checks for me – a skill that has served me well as an adult.) Time to write a letter bitching about how bored I was in college? Doubtful.

Finally, I learned that there was no way in hell I was going to be a business major (hence the switch to the “contract” English degree by year 3). Gee, didn’t it suck during the “greed is good” 80s! But all those econ courses did interest me.

Education IS what you make of it. I seem to have turned out all right. (But then, I’ve also continued taking classes, expanding my skills, and moved from business operations into programming and analysis – I get bored easily.)

I’ve just completed registering my daughter for her freshman year at a suburban high school in an International Baccalaureate program. We spent more time on this than I spent planning out my entire college path.

Do I want my daughter to attend UN-L or a similar school? No. Her prospects and expectations are much higher than my own were.

She’s so much better off being around a group of 300+ 8th graders and the resources that a well-funded, suburban school district have to offer. And navigating the 2500 student high school in her district and taking advantage of all it has to offer will prepare her for college in ways I never could have imagined.

Now my other one, the boy – we’ll be really proud if he manages to nail down a degree from a respectable state school.

Not to pile on you (well, OK, I’m piling on), Lena isn’t one of your 9th grade goslings. As a college freshman, there’s about a 99% chance that she’s eligible to vote in the upcoming election. This young adult didn’t complain only to her peers, her teachers, or even her teachers’ department heads. She went after an entire university and its faculty in the most public forum around.

Should she not be held accountable for her actions because she is young? And is being called out on Scholars and Rogues such a terrible thing? I believe our readership numbers are a bit short of USA Today.

Coincidentally, I had a conversation with my daughter this weekend about middle school math. She doesn’t care for math, and it’s beginning to show up in her grades as the material becomes more demanding and her study habits do not. Her first excuse was, “I have a terrible teacher.” I didnt think about Lena at the time. I just told her what I told her older brother and what I firmly believe:

Learning is your resposibility. No teacher can teach you anything. You can learn. A teacher can help. But if a teacher isn’t helping much, you can still learn, and we expect it of you and you need to expect it of yourself. If you need help outside school, we will get you help. But it is your responsibility to recognize when you need help and to ask for it. If you don’t learn, if you don’t use the resources at your disposal to learn, we will have to step in to make sure it happens.

We think you’d rather do it on your own, but it’s your choice.

Let me reiterate a few things. Lena says she’s “learned how to stretch two pages of information into a 10-page paper.” She attends a university with over two million books in the libary. And she needs to stretch information to fit? She blames her school and teachers for this? She uses Facebook in class? She says she’s payng *(snorfle*) for her education. Can we help it if she’s deliberately trying NOT to get what she’s paying for?

C’mon, Euphronsyne. If anyone ever deserved to be called out for sloppy thinking and a self-centered view of her world, it’s Lena Antman.

I made two things clear in my previous comment: 1 – No, I don’t KNOW the girl, and 2 – yes, I was omniscient like the rest of us. With that on the table:

1: I DO know a thing or two about the profs at CU, since that’s where I got my PhD. While doing so, I taught there for four years. Are there substandard profs – sure. But the picture she paints is pure fiction. And if she can’t tell the rule from the exception, well, that kind of adds more support for my argument.

2: We don’t need to speculate to draw some conclusions. She tells us a great deal about herself. For instance, when she isn’t happy with how class is going, she responds by Facebooking. We’ve all had bad classes and subpar profs, and if you’re like me you hated that. And you might gripe about it, as I did. But you didn’t respond by doodling and opting out. In truth, some of the best work I ever did as an undergrad happened in classes with some of the worst profs. I was a cocky know-it-all, sure – and that led me to respond to profs I didn’t think much of by trying to prove them wrong with my work.

3: In observing what I earlier termed the “pro-Lena” response, I was thinking sort of what you say at the end – that despite it all, she sounds brighter and more articulate than many of the NCLB “flotsam” out there. Hey, she can construct sentences and paragraphs, and that’s more than I can say for some graduating seniors I’ve seen.

But this doesn’t excuse the lack of respect. Yes, a lot of people around here were 19 year-olds. All of us, in fact. But I remember being 19 and full of myself, and the idea of calling out a prof like this? Holy shit, I’d have died. Even if I disagreed, or thought the prof was a bad teacher, or thought he/she was a 140 year-old geezer, at the core was a fundamental respect for the position and what it took to accomplish it.

I think this is at the core of what gripes me. Lena doesn’t respect anything. If you want her respect you earn it by telling her she’s right and has been since the day she was born.

Ah, now I’m talking like I know her again. Well, as you know – probably as well as anybody here or better – we all operate on educated guesses. And nothing feeds those guesses like experience. It’s what it means to be an expert. You deal with a lot of X, and the next time you’re dealing with something in the class of X and it behaves the way X has behaved, you draw inferential conclusions. It’s important not to think yourself omniscient, but it’s also important to trust your experience.

I’m saying I’ve seen a lot that looks and sounds exactly like Lena Antman. I may be wrong, but I’d bet a lot of money that I’m not.

That we were 19, that we were know-it-alls, that we were smartasses (and still are, in some cases) is a little off the point – most of us weren’t 19 year-old smartass know-it-alls like THIS – and it doesn’t excuse her behavior. We tolerate acting out from the really smart kids – I know I always did when I was teaching – because we’re experts on smart and we recognize it and want to encourage it. I have no problems at all when a kid is a smartass like I was.

But we have a hard time when we get that kind of ‘tude from a kid who ISN’T very smart, and demonstrates that lack of superiority at every turn.

“She doesn’t know what an education is because she’s never been to a school that offered one, and that isn’t her fault. She knows what memorization is and she knows what tests are, to be sure. But she doesn’t know what it is to think critically, to think associatively. She doesn’t know, as JS points out, what it is to research. She has no idea how to develop an idea, or how to assimilate information and develop a logical argument from it. And so on. ”

This could very well be the case. Or not. Here’s why I wonder.

As someone who attended a public university as an adult student, I saw plenty of “Bad Lenas.” In the few undergraduate courses for which I couldn’t finesse credit, I also encountered these professorial types: a “Repetitive Mumbler,” a “Perennial No-Show,” a “Bitter Unpublished LitCritTwit,” and at least two “Just Crapped Out of Tenure But Must Finish the Semesters.” The combination of the unteachable and the unable to teach – deadly. Deadening. Depressing.

Does Lena have professors like these? Maybe not. And she did, indeed, “call out” the ones she does have, and she is, therefore, fair game for criticism of her public remarks. Pro-Lena, though? Please. My point, though I may not have made it clear, is that I don’t even know her, or her professors, or her particular situation, and if you think she’s truly a prime example of the flotsam of NCLB, the real thing might kill you. This is just a smartass kid.

But no one around here was ever like that.

Yes, she’s young, and at the age of 19 we were all omniscient, so to some degree I can accept this part of the defense. However, at the age of 19 we didn’t all publicly call out all the professors on our campuses, so it isn’t like JS went hunting for an innocent here. She’s getting spanked because she put herself at the center of the public discussion.

Second, I don’t think she cares about her education at all. She cares a great deal about her resume, I’m sure, but it’s not apparent that she understands what an education IS. I’m trying hard not to overgeneralize, because I haven’t taught this student and don’t know her personally. However, she reminds me a great deal of students I have taught – a GREAT DEAL, to the point that I can easily imagine 20 or so from my last two freshman classes alone that I think could also have written this very letter.

She doesn’t know what an education is because she’s never been to a school that offered one, and that isn’t her fault. She knows what memorization is and she knows what tests are, to be sure. But she doesn’t know what it is to think critically, to think associatively. She doesn’t know, as JS points out, what it is to research. She has no idea how to develop an idea, or how to assimilate information and develop a logical argument from it. And so on.

So it’s hard to lay all the blame on her. She’s one of those children that George Bush didn’t want Left Behind. She knows that she’s supposed to show up, write it down, and spit it back on the test, but mostly she knows that the teacher is there to tell her she’s right and give her a gold star just for being her. She’s entitled to that.

And if she doesn’t get what she’s entitled to, it’s somebody else’s fault and that person has to pay.

I try to reserve my snark-ups for grownups.

Ordinarily, Joy, I’d do the same, but this case is different. You and I (or maybe it’s just I) are completely overmatched by Ms. Antman.

Just ask her.

I think Mines is among the most underrated technical/engineering schools in the country.

As for Euphronsyne’s defense of Ms. Antman, my take is that Ms. Antman cares about her education the way a Burger King customer cares about food. It ain’t the quality of the food that’s the issue. She just wants to have it her way.

In my first year at Mines I learned the importance of getting a good study group together, how to condense a 10 page paper into 2 pages, practiced giving presentations, the importance of actually waking up for that 8 AM lab, and that if a teacher is completely incomprehensible you still have to find a way to pass the class.

Virtually nothing I saw in my first year of Mines was remedial, and while I covered some already familiar ground, the level was usually a notch above what I had seen previously. The “first chemistry test” became a running joke on campus, simply because it was the point that most freshmen seemed to realize “the party is over.”

I believe Euphrosyne raises some extremely valid points in this case. Ms. Antman is young, probably in a series of what are functionally remedial classes, and most likely bored out of her skull in those classes. At the same time, she actually seems to care about the quality of her education. That is more than I can say for most.

Sure, she has an entitlement complex, is immature, and comes across as arrogant and conceited. But then, she’s 18-19 years old.

She may also, under it all, have some valid points that deserve consideration. Perhaps her core problem is that her classes are not challenging her or making her think. Perhaps because the professors (TAs?) have come to the conclusion that they are reteaching the last two years of high school, she feels like there is nothing new on the table. Its worth considering.

I used to try to “save them all.” Now, I work to save the ones who meet me half way. Now, that means either I’ve matured as a professor … or I’ve been an absolute hardass.

For a decade now, I’ve come to believe that as a college prof I’m teaching what they should have learned in their last two years of high school.

As for Lena, she decided to take her complaints public. Good for her. But now, presumably, she’ll learn that the realities of the world beyond those “hallowed halls” and the “Thursday night parties” can fall on her rather abruptly.

That’s the risk undertaken by those who do not approach their education with serious intent and the understanding that they’ll actually have to THINK.

Seriously, some of those Chicago kids are the brightest kids I’ve ever encountered. I’m not so impressed with some of my son’s Yale pals. However, I guess I’ve gotta be nice to all those kids as I will someday be their ward when I’m in my dotage.

Jeff

Whew!

My son says that the UofC consists of very bright kids who study really, really hard. Getting an A there is tough because of the work ethic. Other places have kids as bright, but not too many other places have kids that bright who work that hard.

He says his class discussions are pretty much about the same level as high school, but his high school classes were filled wth Ivy League types.

Can’t comment on the business school. First year advanced calc sends a lot of students around the bend.

The UofC has changed its admissions philosophy in recent years. They still expect kids to self-select out of applying if they aren’t seriously into hard, academic work. In that sense, it’s still an academic boot camp and they’re proud of that. They try hard these days, though, to go after kids who were athletes, student leaders, artists, prom kings and queens, and the like.

I attended a lecture for alums and parents just a few weeks ago. Man, the alums were … ahm … somewhat personality challenged.

Pick out the one you want:)
http://browse.sothebys.com/?q=pissarro

Jeff

You are really way too nice, you know that?

Snark up.

Are other students really running from her? Oh yes. Really bright and accomplished kids here often take classes at CU. I hear the same things from them over and over and over: the CU kids are just like the kids in not-so-challenging high school classes.

I just looked up the top 50 kids from one of the high school’s graduating classes two years ago. I see a number of elite institutions they’ll be attending.

I don’t see a single one that’s attending CU, though about 40% of the overalll graduating class is.