Someone observed that students today cannot argue a point - they only quarrel. The main premise seems to be, "You have upset me; now you must make me feel good again - or else."
One cause is the pursuit of the student population. Every school is recruiting to obtain the student loan money to keep the school funded. They fear the loss of income from students, who can easily flit to another school, one where the new recruitment officer will say, "Poor baby. They did that to you? How unfair."
One advantage of Boomers was this - we were surplus, 25% of the population. Schools could be selective. Getting rid of students was an imperative. Illinois trains put extra passenger cars on after mid-terms, to take all the students home after they flunked out. But that was long ago. Boomers had to spell correctly, use the Queen's English, and form complete sentences. Now all the colleges have remedial classes so the students do not have to flunk out merely because they are illiterate.
Social Media Verities - Not Grasped by Everyone
The social media giants are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger, YouTube, Pinterest, Google Plus, email, and many more.
The key point is - They all show up when doing a Google search. One cannot use them and remain anonymous. LinkedIn provides an autobiography and photo. YouTube and FB - videos.
The forgotten point - They never go away. They exist on servers. They are copied onto hard drives. They remain in archives.
Still unknown to most - Their security settings mean nothing to big entities. The whole point of big data is to find the market and sell to it. FB is for geezers; Instagram is for youth. The ladies love Pinterest.
Headlines, captions, and photos enter Google and stay there. WELS/ELS complaints come back to me - I seem to own most topics they look up on Google, whether they are posts or photos or both. If someone has 12,000 posts, that can happen. Catch up whenever you want.
Easy to copy, easy to find - Plagiarism in college continues at a brisk rate, and I uncover it just as fast. Forgotten is this fact: The essay they found so easily with Google is just as easy to identify with Google. I am much better at Google than college kids, who were teething when I began using the tool daily.
College tantrums, photos at a drunken party, and video stupidities are no longer confined to one school, where they can be forgotten. The students themselves publish them on blogs, YouTube, Twitter, even Facebook. A few smart-alecs have picked fights with this blog, only to realize that their inanities are part of the search when they look for a job.
Corporations routinely do these searches and often eliminate people as prospects when the vampire, Nazi, drug-taking, and alcoholic images show up. Lame excuses sound pretty hollow when they are still in print (or worse - in Google) a few years later.
One young man repented as he faced the job market. He asked that I take down posts that included his name or photo. He was excruciatingly polite, which is rare today. I was happy to remove them all. At the time he was eager to send me messages, and seeing them seemed to energize him to write even more. I began hearing from his college friends, who were stunned by his attitude.
Publishing the truth is not slander, even if makes you upset. The best defense against the charge of slander is - "It's true." If someone says, "This is what I do," then it is not slander to say, "This is what you just claimed you do." To threaten a lawsuit based on your own words is rather silly.
Citing the Eighth Commandment is so routine for WELS/ELS slanderers that I created a graphic just for that. A friend of mine laughs every time he sees it - and he sees it often. I have numerous cry-baby graphics too. If people are laughing at you right now, they might have a reason for it.
Staged tantrums are good for blog page-views. When I first took computer classes in the late 1990s, I was so appalled by student behavior that I wondered about ever teaching them. I saw girls and boys have fits because they walked into a scheduled quiz, forgetting the date, and challenged the teacher about it. "Was this on the syllabus?" Quiet answer - "Yes." Books were slammed on the desk and floor.
When students cry, threaten, snivel, and tweet their outrage, interest in the blog soars among those collegians who normally stick to sports scores and celebrity tweets. The Party in the MLC lobby got students at Martin Luther College, Bethany Lutheran College, and Wisconsin Lutheran College involved in reading Ichabod. MLC teachers warned students against Ichabod, denied warning them, and planned things so they could not be published on Ichabod (denying that fact, of course).
Funny episode at WLC. They were shocked that I had a copy of the lying student editorial defending Party in the MLC. How did I know that? Who invented the Internet - not the Millennials! Uploading to YouTube does not make one a computer expert.
At the moment, 1560 page views show up on the combined posts about one person's Martin Luther College graduation. I wonder if the selective outrage of the college students could be directed toward reconsidering what they are defending.
