There’s
obviously a writing connection to this post, but I’m actually thinking more of
teaching. See, writers know their audiences pretty well. There’s mystery,
fantasy, sci-fi, romance, horror, western, etc. Sure, there are subgenres,
mixed genres, and even tight niches, but we have a pretty good idea of who
would want to read our books. We write for them.
But with
students . . . we don’t know. I was talking with some teacher friends, and
we’re at a loss to understand this particular audience. We used to. But over
the past few years, it’s changed. We’ve all experienced the students who stop
showing up. We could deal with that. It’s easy, we either withdraw them or we
fail them. No problem. But we’ve got a new type showing up, now. They attend
all classes, but never hand in assignments.
We’re all
stumped. More than that, everyone in the class is coming from a different
history, different personal and educational backgrounds. They have different
educational goals from getting into an Ivy League university to having no goal
at all (there’s far too few of the former, and far too many of the latter).
I can’t
even walk it back and define them as a group that chose to get an education as
many are doing it only for financial aid money or to please their parents.
I don’t
really have a point to all this. I don’t have a realization to help me go
forward. I just needed to put this out there. I’ve still got over a month to
prepare for the coming semester, and I’ll need every bit of that time, as I’m
planning some procrastination.