My friend Bill Peace is right: today’s college students are working harder outside the classroom than ever. Many are holding more than one job while taking full course loads. In turn their professors who are charged with providing post-secondary educational course work are frustrated by the many ways today’s students seem to vanish from classes or vanish in conditional ways. My post below raises the thorny issue of “post-ADA” students with disabilities who don’t seem to have the insane work-ethic of their “pre-ADA” professors who often really did have to shoulder whole mountains in the bad old days when accommodations and social acceptance for pwds could be severely conditional at best.
And so I am an old fart. I like to think of myself as a scarred and dented King Salmon who has learned how to bounce off of the rocks and keep on going. In fairness to old farts everywhere and in further latitude to disabled students, I think most students today are reading less and asking fewer tough questions both of themselves and of the faculty.
“Ipse dixit,” says the old salmon. “Ubi sunt?”
The other salmon eye him from a safe distance before they swim away.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 