A classroom concern

This is something I've seen increasingly much in recent years, and I wonder if I'm seeing a trend or if I'm just becoming old and cranky and less tolerant of things.

But I see students in lab settings who

a. Can't easily follow either written or oral directions
b. Are not comfortable manipulating "objects"
c. Think they know a lot, really don't, and aren't always amenable to correction.

I suspect some of this may be the rise of "virtual play." Yes, I'm old, but when I was a kid, video games didn't really exist. (Oh, my dad bought Pong shortly after it first came out - maybe about 1976 or so? But Pong is SUPER boring, and it was even SUPER boring back in the era when there were no better video games to compare it to).

Later, we got a TI-44 or whatever they were called. I learned to play chess on it, and I had a music programmer that would do really bad midi files of the sheet music I typed in. (Bach doesn't sound good in MIDI). And I learned how to use a GOTO loop to make it say "poop" or "fart" (about the baddest of the bad words I even knew, let alone was willing to display on a computer screen).

Later on, when my brother was a pre-teen, he had an Atari system, and later still, both the old original Nintendo and a Sega. (Super Mario Brothers was fun for a while, as was Sonic, but I liked Tetris better)

But at any rate: I was old enough by the time "fun" video games became common that I was never that interested in them. Or, perhaps, my personality is such I never developed an interest in them, seeing as I know people close to my age who are really into them.

My brother, even, wasn't all that taken up with them: LEGO was his thing.

We spent a lot of time in our childhood playing LEGO. Or, when he was younger, we would set up a whole city of the various Fisher-Price houses and businesses and play with those. Or we built stuff, either with blocks or, later, using scrap wood and oddments of hardware. (It was more the building than the having, for those things).

On my own, I made doll clothes and some of my own stuffed animals (even designed my own patterns for them) and I crocheted and later learned to knit (though never did much with that until I was in grad school). And my brother also learned to sew from our mom (on the grounds that "Men lose buttons, too, and sometimes they need to shorten trousers"). And we both learned to bake and cook. And I build dollhouses and made dollhouse furniture - first from things like spools and empty matchboxes, later on using the excellent little Chrysnbon kits (I wonder if they still make those*) that a local shop sold.

(*OH MY GOODNESS OH MY GOODNESS YES THEY DO. You have no idea how much that delights me; I spent lots of time agonizing over which kit to buy with my carefully-hoarded allowance and chore money, and how many happy hours making and then playing with them. They were so great - drawers opened, there were shelves and a drip-pan for the little old-fashioned ice box, and so forth....)

Anyway: a lot of our childhood involved stuff where we were actually physically manipulating things, and also, where we had to follow directions. (I learned to bake before I learned to cook. You have to be a lot more precise in baking, and sometimes the order of steps is more important).

So we learned, first, that following instructions matters if you want a good product, and second, we learned a certain comfort with tools and supplies and things like measuring cups and scales and those tiny bottles of glue....

And I think some of my comfort with, and "good general sense" in lab came from that. (Granted, I was not *excellent* in lab as a student - it seemed like I broke a lot of glassware but I think maybe I was nervous and also rushed and could get a little careless. But I knew what things were for and I knew the correct technique, and really it was mostly the cheap disposable glass pipettes that I broke, not expensive stuff).

But I see something in some of my students now: they are not comfortable in lab. They're afraid to touch or move stuff, and afraid to try stuff out. And yeah, probably some of that is the safety minded DO NOT DO UNAUTHORIZED EXPERIMENTS warning we give them, but there does seem to be an inability to "roll with the punches" that I find frustrating.

It happened this week. The original lab write up I use referred to using 100 mL beakers for something. But, over the years, some of ours broke, some have been "perma borrowed" by another lab, and so often I wind up setting out 150 mL beakers instead. It's NOT a big deal: the job of a beaker is to contain, and in most cases of the lab-stuff I teach, if you have a beaker a little bit bigger, it's not going to make any difference.

But it freaks the students right out. I caught someone this week using a 100 mL *graduated cylinder* and I explained to them that that wasn't a beaker. They responded, 'There are no 100 mL beakers"

Okay, for one thing: the whole "beaker = graduated cylinder" thing is one of my bugbears. I usually find students trying to use a beaker to make a precise measure of something, something you would need a graduated cylinder for, and I have to explain the markings on a beaker are mostly 'advisory' and it is not as accurate as a cylinder is. And that beakers are to hold and cylinders are to measure.

I admit I lost my cool a tiny bit because this was the third person I had told the "look, we don't have any 100 mL beakers, it is not a problem, just roll with it" to within the span of five minutes. And I admit I'm frustrated by the Legislature's inability to make a budget that will cover the needs of the state and I am fearing we get hit with further cuts, so I added on "They all got broken and we can't afford to buy more because we're broke, and it's all Naming of Parts" and I'm reasonably sure they didn't get the last, bit, but: I was thinking of the Henry Reed poem and in particular, the line, "Which in our case, we have not got." (I studied that poem in English class in high school; I always saw it as sort of the doomed uselessness of people preparing for a war for which they were underprepared and didn't have the right supplies, contrasted with the ongoing of nature. Maybe not QUITE what Reed meant, but the whole "we are horribly undersupplied but must go and fight nevertheless" always stayed with me)

And later on, I had to argue with that same person that when you are measuring something in milliliters, you need to do it  with a graduated cylinder and not the electronic balance (which yields grams, and yes, if it were water, 1 gram would more or less equal one milliliter - depending on room temperature - but it was not water being measured).

And that kind of stuff makes me tired. Like I said: don't know if I'm getting older and less good at putting up with it cheerfully, or if the students are less used to labwork.

It's POSSIBLE it's the latter; we've had issues of late of students transferring in where their "basic" intro work was all online - including "online labs," which just seems.....not that good to me. Certainly not good for learning the different lab equipment - I have noticed the beaker/graduated cylinder confusion is something that has shown up in the past 7 years or so, with the rise of online intro courses.

But also, I worry about the rise of "virtual play." I get that some parents might like the idea a lot - say you live in a Tiny House. How much better that your kids have an iPad instead of a bulging toybox! And also, you never step on Barbie shoes, or have to retrieve a Hot Wheel* from under the stove.


(*Is the singular of Hot Wheels still "Hot Wheels," or is it "Hot Wheel"? I mean, it is one car but it still has four wheels....)

And your kid can have INFINITE LEGO if you have them all in the cloud instead of in a toybox. (Though I would argue there are maybe also problems with the kid not having the limits that we faced of running out of particular sizes or colors of LEGO bricks....perhaps a more philosophical or moral danger than an intellectual one, I don't know)

But the thing is - moving shapes on a screen is different than actually clicking the blocks together by hand (or fighting to get them apart, and I wonder if some of the tooth damage I have originated from me using my "first set of tools" to pry recalcitrant bricks apart). And I think you do develop a comfort and facility for working with "stuff" when you are working with real "stuff."

(I also think some of my doll-dressmaking and stuffed-toy making taught me how to manage with limited supplies - I had little money for fabric and no way to get to a fabric shop, so I had to use the scraps and offcuts from my mom's sewing a lot of the time. And my mom talks of using unpicked basting thread from HER mother to sew doll clothing with. Waste not, want not)

But, I don't know. I admit this is one specific way in which I am a Luddite: just as I prefer books made of actual paper (because Big Brother can't alter their electrons - he may be able to seize and burn them, but not if you hide them well or have a way to defend your stash. But also because if the Internet goes down, or the power goes out, you can still read them. And you don't have to re-buy books when there's a format change, as the format of paper books has not changed since Gutenberg....)

But I do think "real" toys are better than virtual ones. (I read with dismay this week that Cracker Jack has ditched actual prizes in favor of QR codes. And what do you do if you're a kid without a smartphone - I am sure such kids actually exist - then you get no prize. And yeah, the recent ones were paper and crummy, and I can't eat Cracker Jack any more (peanuts, and also, they're too hard and sticky for my teeth). But still - what was the line from "Breakfast at Tiffany's"? - "That's nice to know... It gives one a feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity with the past, that sort of thing." (the clerk asking Paul : "do they really still put prizes in Cracker Jack?") Well, I guess there's another bit of solidarity gone, sadly.)

And I wonder, as the whole "virtual play" thing, coupled with the "toys are for babies" thing (I've read more places that kids at 8 or 9 are giving up their toys in favor of.....I don't know what and am not sure I want to) means we get future generations not at home with "playing" and experimentation, and that worries me slightly. And yes, I do see it in lab - people who are either afraid to do anything, or who are so bad with their hands that they can't measure things out, or whatever.

And yeah, part of my job is to teach that stuff, but the class in question was a junior-level class. They should KNOW already.