Time Essay Questions.

(Name

Professor ________ (Subject

28 February 2009

Analysis of My Freshman Year : What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

Cultural anthropologist and author Rebekah Nathan noted with an alarming tone in her book , My Freshman Year : What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student , that even though students and professors interact with each other on a regular basis , they do not really understand each other . Both groups appear to be unaware or ignorant about the experiences of the other . As Nathan wrote

This kind of ignorance , as international

students argued , leads to misperceptions and sometimes intolerance at both ends . Students and faculty encounter each other in distinct hierarchical roles , and this conditions the way we experience each other (134

Based on my own experiences and observations of student culture , the gap or usual lack of understanding between students and the professors they encounter arises from two probable key reasons . On one hand , you have the general apathy typical of most modern-day students , who are well aware that learning is not isolated to the classroom . In some instances , students may sometimes be grappling with some personal turmoil or family problem , to some extent distracting them from fulfilling all academic expectations . The latter case , however represents only a small minority . The more prevalent reason why students show nonchalance towards the requirements of their professors based on my own observations , is that they have grown accustomed to lackluster teaching methods that have been practiced long ago . Students oftentimes take for granted the...