Generations

SilverLady(SO) · Post by **SilverLady(SO)** » Wed Oct 05, 2011 8:51 pm

GENERATIONS

People born before 1946 were called The Silent Generation..

People born between 1946 and 1964 are called The Baby Boomers.

People born between 1965 and 1979 are called Generation X.

People born between 1980 and 2010 are called Generation Y.

Why do we call the last group Generation Y?

Y should I get a job?

Y should I leave home and find my own place?

Y should I get a car when I can borrow yours?

Y should I clean my room?

Y should I wash and iron my own clothes?

Y should I buy any food?

Y are you always picking on me?

But a cartoonist explained it very eloquently in the link below:

Generation Y Cartoon

Paula G · Post by **Paula G** » Thu Oct 06, 2011 1:59 pm

Very good SL, thank you

Post by **DonnaT** » Thu Oct 06, 2011 4:55 pm

I'm thinking there should be a Backpack generation.

Gillian · Post by **Gillian** » Sat Oct 08, 2011 9:00 am

That is not so much funny as it is true. You should try to get any work out of them. There thought is, "I showed up, isn't that good enough to get my paycheque?".

Paula G · Post by **Paula G** » Mon Oct 10, 2011 7:25 pm

Over the last few years I have tried to give work to various young men I know, mostly through the Church I am a member of. I have always found that they have let me down, they are late, or don;t turn up at all, they don;t work when they do get there, and need re-training every day as they forget everything I told them overnight. OK maybe I'm just unlucky, but now I have a "mature" woman working with me who is excellent, it did however lead to the rather unfortunate line
"I've given up on young boys, now I'm into middle aged women"

Joan · Post by **Joan** » Tue Oct 11, 2011 3:59 pm

Very topical Paula, in UK neswpapers today it said that Large Institutions are unhappy with the quality & work ethos (committment) of both school leavers & graduates.

Joan

Leeza · Post by **Leeza** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 12:40 pm

In this country (USA) there have been at least a couple of things that have contributed to the above mentioned problem.

One is the bumming down of the school system.

As I was going through elementary school they were changing the text books behind me. I had the opportunity to see some of those text books and was surprised at the changes. The material they were getting in 4th grade was what I had been taught in 3rd grade. (This was back in the 50s)

In the early 1900's there were a lot of one room country schools. teaching grades 1 through 8. In an effort to make sure the kids were getting an education there was a test administered to the kids before they could graduate. A few years ago I had the opportunity to look at one of those tests. Even though I have had some college there was no way I could have passed it.

About 5 years ago one of the larger area schools put out that if a student had graduated from their school that they would guarantee that the student could read and write. To me that is pretty pathetic.

My Dad was educated in the country schools and he said that some of the advantages were that by the time you graduated you had had the material 8 times. Another thing you would see is a kid that understood the material helping out someone who was having trouble with it even if they were grades apart.

I know that when my class went into high school 7 kids from country schools joined us. At high school graduation 5 of them were in the top 1/3 and 2 were in the middle.1/3 of our class.

Another thing is parenting or should I say lack there of. Some of it is due to laws and some of it is due to other reasons.

Too many parents think that providing food, clothing, shelter, and a little quality (fun) time are all that is required from them. Let the school and the mall handle the rest of it. If the school takes an action though then they scream bloody murder.

Kids need correction, but also need love. After raising 10 kids I can tell you that each is different in what will work. I had one that you had to use the proverbial 2 X 4 on to get his attention, another that all you had to do was talk to, and everything in between. All of them knew they were loved and still are.

After all this I am reminded of an editorial I read a number of years ago that was about the current generation and how bad they were doing. It went on about the lack of respect and poor work ethics. In general it covered most of the things we say about the up coming generation. This editorial was written in 1895. So I guess some things never change.

Leeza

Lydia · Post by **Lydia** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 12:40 pm

"bumming down" = "dumbing down"
Even at the college level.
Over my 30+ year teaching at a college that shall be nameless but known for its high intellectual standards, I have seen the inflation of grades and deflation of learning. This was true even in the sciences. What used to be taught at the freshman level, is now reserved for the graduates.
A truly gifted student must possess the initiative to take special courses and activities, otherwise accept the boredom of mediocrity. Much effort and funds are well spent on helping the mentally impoverished, but the brightest are left to shift for themselves.

Hugs,

Lydia

Ralitsa · Post by **Ralitsa** » Sat Oct 15, 2011 7:15 pm

I just had an interesting conversation with my daughter (13 yo) a few days ago. Basically she was looking for my permission to ignore her teacher and get on with life. This initially sounds bad. The problem is that she is immensely bored, her teachers basically teach to the slowest kids and the rest get to twiddle their thumbs. So yes, I told her that only she could be responsible for learning the things she needed to know and she should do whatever she sees fit, the teachers were there, but ultimately they were only worried about collecting the pay check.
I read a very curious quotation some years back, I don't remember who said it, or maybe it is an old adage, and I don't have it exact but it's something like: children will fulfill whatever their fathers expect of them. Ultimately it's the parents expectations, and particularily I think the fathers, which drive children to accomplish something. A good deal of the problem we have in the US is first, single parent households, and secondly no clear expectation being set regarding academic performance. My oldest daughter (now 22) when she was in high school once came to me with B's in math, for which she was quite proud. And I told her something like "It's OK, but you can get A's and you should be getting A's." She was upset with me, and her mother gave me no end of grief about it, but the next quarter she got A's.
So anyway, if you let them get away with being dumb they will be, but if you kick them in the tail feathers they will do whatever they need to. Nothing about that has changed since the beginning of time.

SilverLady(SO) · Post by **SilverLady(SO)** » Sat Oct 15, 2011 8:05 pm

Ralitsa wrote:So anyway, if you let them get away with being dumb they will be, but if you kick them in the tail feathers they will do whatever they need to.

I've always heard it as: "Applied education to the seat of learning."

No matter how you say it, it's still true!!

- SL

Anthony Simon · Post by **Anthony Simon** » Thu Oct 20, 2011 1:16 pm

Lydia wrote:"bumming down" = "dumbing down"
Even at the college level.
Over my 30+ year teaching at a college that shall be nameless but known for its high intellectual standards, I have seen the inflation of grades and deflation of learning. This was true even in the sciences. What used to be taught at the freshman level, is now reserved for the graduates.
A truly gifted student must possess the initiative to take special courses and activities, otherwise accept the boredom of mediocrity. Much effort and funds are well spent on helping the mentally impoverished, but the brightest are left to shift for themselves.

Hugs,

Lydia

The really crazy thing is that these societies (I'm thinking particularly of the UK) have made a big thing about competition. But this has occurred at just the same time as the dumbing down. You would have thought that "nurturing intelligence" (as a woman I spoke to on the bus a few months ago put it) would be top of the agenda in such societies, but nope.

What you've got here (in the UK) is more people in higher education, much more competition (in terms of grades required) but a society, to judge by the level of popular culture (say pop music), that has gone straight downhill. It's like people are happy with the superficials of achievement (more people at University, higher grades) and don't look too hard at the other side of it.

And, in the UK at least, boy (girl) do we need to compete....

Lacy Mitchell · Post by **Lacy Mitchell** » Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:08 pm

on the net the other day someone called them the ( every one gets a trophy genaration )can't hurt any ones feeling even if they fail.

Paula G · Post by **Paula G** » Mon Nov 21, 2011 2:38 pm

The proplem we have in the UK with qualifications is not that the exams are getting any easier (dumbing down) it's that teachers are better at teaching kids to pass exams. The exams themselves have been shown to be just as difficult as they were 20, 30 and 40 years ago, yet grades and the nuber of high grades just keep getting better.

Teachers and school are now paid arcording to performance, how is performance measured, by exam results. The outcome is that kids are not taught anything that does not relate to an examination, and child who may not get a good grade is not entered, and usefull personal development is ignored.

My daughter is in the exam factory at the oment and the pressure that the school puts o the kids is far too much, adding more pressure from parents seems to me counter productive.

Post by **DonnaT** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 6:44 am

A lot of that going on here also, Paula.