My love of punk rock reflects my general paranoia about the messages that consumer culture crams into our heads. This week, in meeting with students about bar prep, poor performance, or other issues, I was struck by how many students made some reference to their need to relax. For example, I got an email saying someone couldn't meet at a certain time because "that was the time they went home to take a nap." Another student told me that they were spending all of Spring Break "beaching and golfing." Another student listened to my spiel about bringing up her grades and then said, "That's great advice — but, to be honest, I'm not doing that much work."
It kills me when students fail the bar and it turns out they did under 50 percent of their commercial bar prep. I generally blame the phenomenon on computers, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's really coming from advertising and culture.
Since we live in a consumer culture, most of the messages we get on a daily basis are about consuming. Consuming goes hand and hand with relaxing — stop doing whatever it is you are doing and eat this burger, drink this coffee, put two iron tubs out in your backyard and hold hands with your mate, etc. Social media reflects it in weird pictures of people's dinners and smiling vacation shots. Besides advertising and social media, there's constant messaging about working less, slowing down, and smelling the roses. That stuff has to sink in.
ASP is in a weird position because we're often dealing with students in crisis, and we are often counselors and sounding boards for struggling students. Consequently, being a hard ass and piling on a bunch more work is probably not a fantastic idea. However, although I used to worry about "burn out" when figuring out study plans for struggling students, I've more or less stopped taking that into consideration. Making the assumption that no student is going to do 100 percent of what I say, I figure I don't need to add to the constant barrage of "you deserve and need to take time off" that students hear everyday. I tell them they need to sleep, eat healthy, and exercise, but I leave relaxing for them to figure out.
The above post may ultimately be just another example of an older generation dissing on a younger one ("Back in my day, I had to walk uphill both ways to school"), but I want all of them to succeed. I used to describe what I do as teaching them to study "smarter," but maybe I should really change it to studying "smarter and harder."
The Smiths — Work is a Four-Letter Word
(Alex Ruskell)
