The two statements made here about some students coming in with a sense of entitlement and the one about using common sense really struck a nerve with me. I teach at a for-profit technical education school located in a city with a high population of lower-income students, many of whom see this as a way up out of poverty. I'm glad they're trying to improve their lives and make a better living for themselves and their children, but so many of our students come to us expecting our education philosophy to be the same as in the large public city high schools from which they graduated. As the author said, they feel they should pass all classes because they are paying a tuition for them, so students listen to music or check their Facebook pages, and get mad at me when I expect them to answer a question based on the material they ignored.
With the introduction of state-wide standardized testing, teachers concentrate on teaching to pass a test, and students not only don't KNOW how to think, they don't see a reason for it.
One of my favorite mantras in class is that students, when they get to their jobs, will have to make decisions that will affect their patients. They will have to decide if the number answer they see on the calculator is a sensible thing to say, such as "He needs to buy two and a half bottles of bleach." I'll always add a note questioning this, asking the student if a person CAN buy half a bottle of a product, and some of our liveliest discussions in class address this type of reasoning. Of course, those students who didn't bother participating and instead listened to music or checked their online status missed out on the whole point of the discussion, and so they don't understand why I didn't give them full credit when the calculator clearly gave the correct answer.
And then they tell me "You're not helping me. You gave me a bad grade."
Sigh
