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2 Responses to ““Students today are…””

1. 1 Tomasello
   January 8, 2009 at 2:12 pm

   There is a two-pronged fallacy that Marsalis is operating under.  Let me bore you a bit from a music prof’s point of view.One of the first things I experienced as an instructor was the disconnect between the way students approached being students and my understanding of what it meant to be a student.  I’ve dissected this into two essential differences:

   (1) I was statistically very smart and a super student once I got my act together; and

   (2) since I was a guitar instructor and was headed for college teaching, I saw my professors as role models. I was appreciative of their quirks, their use of language and metaphor and their jokes and pedagogical methods.

   (1) Most of my students are slightly above average intelligence (the middle 25-75%-ile of the freshman student SAT scores are 1020-1230 (U.S. News & World Report), the 50-80th%-ile by today’s  standards, whereas my SAT would put me well over the 90th%-ile.) So, while I was looking out over the tops of those freshly washed, 18-year-old heads, odds are I wasn’t looking at my head. The same level of talent and the work ethic was just not there in the vast majority of students.  I would imagine that most college instructors, on average, are both smarter and harder workers than their students.

   (2) My best students want to be accountants or want to work for Bear Stearns. They can tackle the material I present well enough, but they don’t participate in the thinking with me. They don’t become involved in the intellectual process, by and large. They are keen assessors of the classroom situation, determine what they must do to get by in the class (this includes getting the “A”), work towards that final project, and then completely bail when the semester is over. I’ve seen music business students become orgasmic when they find out that the rights to the master tapes of Thriller are probably owned by Epic Records and not by Michael Jackson [*yawn*]. Each of them is into something very deeply (e.g., mixing, DJing, artist management, music marketing) that I know little about and care even less about. What interests them about what I teach is not what interests me. And even at the graduate level, my music students knew very little about what I knew nor were they remotely interested in the specific topics of the sub-discipline at the doctoral level. Each student has his or her “thing,” which is, by definition, not the instructor’s “thing.”So, Branford Marsalis as a music student (1) had more talent and possessed a greater work ethic than most of his students have, which is proven by the fact that not all of his students will become sucessful, professional musicians (some will end up as cabbies and high school band directors–not that there’s anything wrong with that); and (2) what interests Marsalis, e.g., college teaching, classical music, jazz production, charitable organizations, etc., does not necessarily interest all of his students to the same degree.  They might be passionate about rap or producing techno, but they’re not into what he’s into. But, that being said, most students, like most people, are incapable of dealing with criticism and are self-deluding, narcissistic, and completely full of shit.

2. 2 glenn petersen
   February 13, 2009 at 5:09 pm

   Andrew concludes, by way of Marsalis’s diatribe, that “most students, like most people, are incapable of dealing with criticism and are self-deluding, narcissistic, and completely full of shit.”
   As usual, Mark Twain said it first:
   “I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That’s bad enough for me.”
    
   I agree with most of what Andrew has to say, actually; I recently wrote about this in my post on the Baruch Teaching Blog, “We Were Young Once…and Nerds.”  I find Marsalis’s remarks, in a word, infuriating.  If civilized life were disintegrating as rapidly as each subsequent generation claims when it reaches maturity, the world would have spiraled into the lowest circle of hell in about 320 BC.  And why, I ask myself, would anyone even want to teach students as horrid as those he portrays?  I could go on shrieking and rending my garments, but instead I’ll just say, hardly for the first time, that I can’t believe I get paid to do something as rewarding as teaching my students.