Today in Cultural Appropriation

I will give you $100 American if you give this speech before the next game in front of everyone.

 

She'd get it if she were a mother.

 

I wouldn't label this a hypothesis (it's more a DQ conjecture), but one thing I think I see that's slightly different about millennials is that they don't process feedback quite the way we did it in my day.

Let's say that you have a millennial whose self-image is "A student." And let's contrast him/her with some non-millennial who has the exact same self-image. And finally, let's assume they're both right ... yep, both are A students.

Now, let's assume they've just gotten some disappointing grade back on a test. It's not shattering, it's just not great. Maybe a high C.

The non-millennial will tend to process that grade in all sorts of different ways ... "That sonofabitch!" "Fuck, why'd I go out partying the night before?" "Damn, this shit is hard!" "Holy hell, I better knuckle down!" ... and so will the millennial. But the millennial will be a good bit more likely to also take it as threat to his/her self-image ... "How can this guy say this about me!?!?"

I have a similar conjecture along those lines to the effect that "best practices" in education has led younger people to expect a pretty invariant string of scores ... so if a course has four tests, each grade for "A student" must be in the A range, otherwise something is horribly wrong.

Maybe this is the way high achievers always have been. By the time I'd become a high achiever academically, I was a married man with children; my self-image was "Fucked"! But I can honestly say that I can't recall an instance in which I got some unpleasant feedback and felt my ... being ... to have been threatened.

 

I'm really not well-versed in Bell Curve principals, doesn't it just prioritize relativism without a rubric or some other standard? Not all cohorts are created equal, right? (Which makes me think of annual recruiting rankings, HOF threads, sabremetrics, etc., etc. ...)

 

I've been ... observing ... my undergrads' reactions to their final grades and it's been interesting. I have (had, actually, thank God!) one student, you should hear the tales of woe: "I worked sooooo hard on this course, and I deserve a LOT better grade than a B."

This student came to class about half the time at the start of the semester, all but blew off (other than exams) the latter third of the course, and was pestering classmates for help in last-minute panics prior to the penultimate and final exams. How this student did as well as he/she did on the final I'll never know (although I'm fairly confident no cheating went down). This student walked into the final with a D or F as a distinct possibility, but somehow pulled out a MIRACLE of a B.

And is talking to classmates (who are trolling this student like hell) about appealing the grade.

Bring. It. On.

 

You're mean.

 

They're not created equal, but I'd bet that at fairly selective (or better) institutions, they're pretty damn close. And it's not like we're talking about flunking a given percentage ... rather, it's a given percentage is going to get a B-, etc.

 

That was the great thing about going to a party school state university. Everyone was thrilled with a B.

Because no company cares if their middle management had a 2.5 or a 2.8 or a 3.4 grade point average in college.

 

This student says it's so unfair because this B puts an "academic honors" scholarship at risk. Ummmm ... no. You put the academic honors scholarship at risk, champ.

 

First semester at Michigan Law:

Professor: “And, of course, you are all scared to death that if you don’t get this concept, you will fail the course. And by ‘fail,’ of course, I mean get a B+.”