Myths My Students Believe

Published by

Clarissa

June 12, 2012

I encounter the following beliefs so often among my students that I’ve grown sick and tired of offering explanations how things really work:

Communism and fascism are the same thing.
All government is bad all taxes are evil.
Unlike citizens, illegal immigrants in this country are entitled to free medical care.
Until 30 years ago or thereabouts, women never worked.
“Columbus was a hero, almost like Jesus or something.” That’s a direct quote, by the way.
Voting is useless because all politicians lie anyways.
You cannot be a college professor in the US if you are not a US citizen.
Trying hard should be enough to succeed. Especially if your Mommy can testify that you did try hard.
People who receive emails have a magic way of finding out who the sender of the message is. This makes signing or addressing emails redundant.
Punctuation is vastly overrated. Nobody really needs to use it.
People who break up a text in paragraphs do that because they are weird.
Analyzing a text or a painting means saying whatever you want about them without offering an ounce of proof. If the professor objects, just tell them indignantly that this was your opinion and you thought the point was to share opinions.
There isn’t a whole lot of a difference between “Essay is due on Friday at 5 pm” and “Essay is due up to a week after Friday at 5 pm.”
Saying “Reading is booooring!” will make a literature professor adore you.
It makes total sense to take an intensive online course if you have no access to the Internet.
Cold War was a war between the Soviet Union and the Nazis. (I’m always afraid to ask who won.)
Emails need to be checked once a week, at most. Facebook, on the other hand, has to be updated every 10 minutes.
Latin America is a country. So is Africa.

And my favorite: “Oh, so Hitler is dead?? Really?? That’s fantastic!” I mean, I’m always ready to brighten up somebody’s day, so yeah, the jerk has been dead for decades.

This is an intensive course I’m teaching right now, people, so I need to vent often. Especially now that the course is drawing to an end. I promise to stop bitching soon and start writing happy posts.

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21 responses to “Myths My Students Believe”

thevenerablecorvex

June 12, 2012

One wonders why the Soviets and the Nazis bothered to fight the Cold War against each other if Communism and Fascism are really the same thing anyway.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  June 12, 2012
  
  Ah, that’s a good one! I think I should use it on them, see what happens.
  
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2. Lindsay
  
  June 13, 2012
  
  They were fighting over whose idea it was first! DUH.
  
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JE

June 12, 2012

I’m guilty of not always checking my email often enough, but in my defence in my three years so far I’ve not recieved a single important message by email

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hkatz

June 12, 2012

Ask them what the capitals of Latin America and Africa are (will they give you countries then or say things like “Cancun!”)

At least they’re not telling you that the Cold War is related to climate change 🙂

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1. Pen
  
  June 12, 2012
  
  I mean, the global cooling hypothesis did come out in the 1960’s.
  
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Fie Upon This Quiet Life

June 12, 2012

Wait … Hitler’s dead? Omg, let’s have a party. (Kidding.)

I was talking about Orwell’s novel 1984 in class once (just as a side example), and said something about communism. One of my students raised her hand and said, “What’s communism?” Before I could answer — I was surprised she didn’t know, but I was prepared to explain it to her because I thought it was important for her to know — another students piped up and yelled “Are you a fucking idiot?” I said, “You seem to know a lot about it. Why don’t you explain it?” He made himself look like an ass. Then, I explained and talked to both of them after class. To the first, I said to always feel free to ask questions. To the second, I said he needed to respect the fact that not everyone knows everything and that he acted inappropriately. It was a tough day in the classroom. But I was definitely surprised that the first student was so uninformed.

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Sarah Brodsky (@sarahbrodsky)

June 12, 2012

I like the “women never worked” one. My great-grandmother was a pharmacist. 🙂

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  June 12, 2012
  
  I especially like ‘Since times immemorial, women never worked.’ A cliche + a silly statement, and all in just a few words.
  
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Lamestllama

June 12, 2012

I am sure they are getting the Cold war mixed up with the Winter war and the Continuation war.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  June 12, 2012
  
  Am I getting outdated? For me, the Cold War is enormously relevant. And these kids were born AFTER it ended.
  
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  1. the twisted spinster
    
    June 13, 2012
    
    I can’t conceive of this level of ignorance either. The Cold War defined my entire childhood and young adulthood. It was the reason behind everything, and we’re still feeling a lot of its effects.
    
    But your whole list depresses me. How are their parents raising them? Do they talk to their children about anything other than what they’re having for dinner? My parents and I talked about all sorts of things. They wanted me to know about the world. Today’s parents seem intent upon bringing up their children to be as ignorant as possible — they call this “preserving their innocence.”
    
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  2. musteryou
    
    June 13, 2012
    
    the twisted spinster:
    
    “Today’s parents seem intent upon bringing up their children to be as ignorant as possible — they call this “preserving their innocence.”
    
    Yes— that is the recognition my memoir starts with, and the rest of it is an exploration of the consequences of this phenomenon.
    
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musteryou

June 12, 2012

As the Japanese may say, “Hitler died a very wrong time ago.”

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AYY

June 13, 2012

I was surprised to read that about a student not knowing that Hitler was dead. When I read academic blogs, I get the impression that the complaint is just the opposite– that there are students who can rattle off things like the German order of battle in the northern segment of the Kursk salient, or the frequency of the suspension system breakdowns in the Mark IV tank in the first half of 1944, or the Japanese cruiser deployment off the Alaskan coast during the Battle of Midway, but those students don’t seem to have much of an interest in knowing anything else about world history.

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1. thevenerablecorvex
  
  June 13, 2012
  
  Hitler has become such a cartoonish stereotype of “pure evil” in the media, that honestly I’m a bit surprised that the student knew that he was a real person.
  
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bloggerclarissa

June 13, 2012

” Today’s parents seem intent upon bringing up their children to be as ignorant as possible — they call this “preserving their innocence.””

– I think those parents are just as ignorant. If a child saw from the beginning of her or his life that the parents start the day with acquainting themselves with the news and discussing them, if history and politics were regularly discussed at home, they might generate some interest. But with apathetic, inert parents, what kind of children can one expect?

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Rob F

June 13, 2012

“Until 30 years ago or thereabouts, women never worked.”

That is correct. Women have always worked. Indeed, I am reading a book published in 1900 that explicitly and specifically advocates that women support themselves through employment rather than being dependant on a husband.

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Lindsay

June 13, 2012

Ha!

I might be able to explain the not-signing-emails one: they probably really *do* think you can see who they are because, at least on the email service I use (Hotmail, which is a very common, free service that at least some of your students probably use), the inbox will have the sender’s name — not their email address, the name under which they registered with whatever email service they’re using — displayed to the left of the subject heading.

I can see names regardless of whether a person is on my contacts list or not. So that’s the “magic” your students are probably assuming you have.

It’s not infallible; sometimes I’ll get an email from somebodyorother@whatever.com, rather than from John Doe. It might depend on whether the two email services share data with one another, or on something John Doe has done to shield his personal information, or on something else I haven’t thought of.

This isn’t to excuse people from signing their names in correspondence, whether it’s electronic or not, I just wanted to point out that there is actually some basis for expecting that one’s name will be displayed alongside one’s email automatically.

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Lindsay

June 13, 2012

Whoops, your comment system seems to think somebodyorother@whatever.com is a valid email address. I hope such a person does not really exist, and that I haven’t made hir a target for any spam …

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  June 13, 2012
  
  That would be funny. In a cruel kind of way. Imagine the poor person just sitting there, without suspecting anything. . . 🙂
  
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