Inside View from Ireland: Orienting to World of New Students

EVERY SUMMER, I think about the world of my incoming students because if I don't respect the perspective of new third level students, I become irrelevant or worse. I would be "lame" but that would not mean "disabled". I scribbled down 10 things that place those students in a mental space that differs markedly from where I have come. This fall, half of the members of the Class of 2011 were born in 1989. For them, Ted Bundy, Don the Beachcomber, Emperor Hirohito, Abbie Hoffman, Huey Newton and Andrei Sakharov have always been dead. Here are 10 questions that could come from those born before the 90s.

1. Was the Berlin Wall like a county border for tourists?

2. Why do they call it "dialing" a number?

3. Why do old printers have the paper rolling into place instead of feeding in flat?

4. You're messing! Sure Ireland has always had toll roads.

5. How could you make sense out of money if it wasn't decimalised?

6. Milk used to come in glass bottles? No way!

7. According to what is in my book, this Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.

8. You said "mainstream" and rap music has always been mainstream in my music lists.

9. "The Right Hook" is George Hook, and you're saying "off the hook" has to do with a telephone?

10. So that scratchy sound was originally made with a needle rubbing the wrong way across the music? And how come you have to use a needle? Couldn't you just plug into the sound track?

I need to review the backgrounds of those I teach because if I understand common points of reference, I can attach knowledge to those places. Like Doug Noon, I use the metaphor of a river delta when approaching the process of collective knowledge construction. River deltas grow interminably. River deltas are complex systems that grow and change in response to instability and opportunity. River deltas creates new terrain even as they relentlessly carves new channels. As Noon says, "A river delta, like the classroom, is a complex system with a form that can’t be accurately described or predicted with simple cause and effect metrics. Each river delta is uniquely different from every other. Yet they’re similarly configured, as are classrooms. They are dynamic forms that expand the limits of possibility."