What ever happened to studying the old fashioned way?

[daddyrx]

I have been noticing that more and more kids (including college age) are resorting to chemical crutches to 'increase their studying efficiency'. I guess 'good' study habits have morphed into a 'gimme some pills so I can study' type of studying. I was, and I'm sure the more mature members here were, taught how to study early on by our parents. Comments?

[GaryR]

They don't teach courses the way you or I learned them when we were in school, nor do kids have formalized study habits. When you or I were in school, study meant go to a quiet place with no distractions, a good reading light, and reading the assignment. Today, there are far too many distractions. The computer, the Game Boy, television, cell phones, text messages every 2 minutes, loud music, the Ipod, all of these things make clear thinking impossible. Additionally, they don't teach any courses today that require learning critical thinking. Gone are the hard math and science courses, replaced by learning feel-good nonsense, or why Mary has 2 mothers, or why we should waste 1 second worrying about drowning Polar Bears, or why we must worry about a 0.1 degree rise (or fall, I forget now) of global temperatures over 100 years, or the latest Obama song. I heard a news article on the radio this morning where we were dropping precipitously in math and science in this country. I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it was something like 22nd in the world in math, and 27th in science, something like that. These are pathetic statistics. If you go over to the Mathematics Yahoo Answers board, you'll see kids in there every single night, posting their homework for others to solve for them. They can't even work the simplest math problems, stuff you studied the first week in Algebra I. I see kids posting questions on the Geography board asking such innane homework questions as, "which ocean are the Hawaiian Islands located?" They are too damned lazy to even open an atlas and look up the name of the ocean; they'd rather post it online for someone else to do their homework. If we continue this trend, we will deteriorate down to about 100th in the world in math and science without any difficulty at all. Thank you, No Child Left Behind ("no child succeeds"), and teacher's unions (the most incompetent teachers must be retained). And, parents need to wake up quickly and start demanding performance from their little darlings, and quit worrying about making them "feel good." They don't need Ipods; they need their butts kicked for being lazy.

[liαnαjσhαnnα*]

I'm not a mature member on here but a lot of people usually resort to drugs through pressure - not necessarily peer pressure either. A lot of things have changed such as the methods of studying which include computer friendly methods. The thing is if you ask a 16/17/18 year old to research something on the internet, they will most probably post the question on here whilst chatting on Facebook. The problem is concentration - if you look around there are so many things you could do instead which causes the problem. 30 years ago you wouldn't have had the internet or the Wii.

These issues cause pressures for a young person to develop good studying skills as you have the same amount of work yet more things they feel they need too.

[46XX]

I don't know if I'm mature or not,I mean I'm 21 and in my 3rd year of medical uni...what I see around my self is that "'gimme some pills so I can study' type of studying" you mentioned...but I personally was taught how to study early on by my parents,and this type is few these days...Sadly. Most of my classmates use Ritalin to be awake at midnights to study and it's just because they don't know the 'good' study habits...and studying is just for good marks! I don't see any professional commitments in them and it's really DANGEROUS for a would be Doctor! Wow I just can't imagine how their gonna cure a patient, they gonna Kill them!

Thanks for sharing,I really love it when someone Care this much

[lady_bella]

I am right there with GaryR. I agree 100%! My nephew and niece live in a small town, and all those kids over there think of is, who is with who, can I get this girl, or that boy to date me.....it's all about who you're going out with. I see my nephew on FB and his sister, now 20, tells me he is getting four "F"s. He is so smart, but won't apply himself and all his mother wants to do is 'make deals' with him to get him to do his homework. Parents need to make their children accountable for their actions, and have consequences instead of making 'deals' with their children, as my sister does. You are right daddyrx.....students are using crutches to help them get through school, and I see the same thing as GaryR mentioned on Y/A with kids asking questions about their homework wanting others to do the work for them. And there are stupid people answering those questions. And these kids are our future? God help us!

[John de Witt]

I know a lot of people who abused amphetamines in the 60's and 70's, so let's keep a little perspective. And as for making judgments on relative risks, even though adults seem generally poor at it, that's nothing compared to adolescents. Of course, in our day, it was more socially acceptable to beat sense into the little morons! and today, your corporate bosses in outpatient pharmacy, or our hospital administrators in medicine, fuss at YOU for "upsetting the customer" if you tell them they're being foolish. You're supposed to forget professional ethics in favor of an absurd "the customer is always right" mentality. You and I both know the customer is as a general rule wrong, simple-minded, and foolish.

[Tommy]

Kids these days are simply too lazy. I'm growing up in the generation, not to say that I do not do my share of slacking, but I see it all around me; my generation is simply wasting time with video games and other pointless activities. Parents often times look around that obsession and look to the schools, teachers and pharmacist for the answers. My teacher had us do an essay on this topic recently, here is the site that contains what we wrote about:

http://www.dumbestgeneration.com/home.html

[Pangolin]

Agree all around.

As a parent, I hold MY kids accountable, but I think I may be in the minority. I consider it MY job to see that my children are educated, with help from the schools. I do not abdicate my responsibility in that regard. My kids use proper grammar, write in complete sentences and use textspeak only when texting or with friends. Until they are 18, they tell me where they are and what they are doing, and God help them if they lie about it.

In return, they get a place to live, a (used) car to drive, and a college education. Spawnlings 1 & 2 have managed to get some scholarship money, based on grades alone, so something must be working.

I asked my daughter if she knows of anyone who uses Ritalin or other drugs to help study, and she says not. Maybe it's because we live in a school district where most people strive for mediocrity. I don't push my kids, but I have high expectations for them, and encourage them to have high expectations for themselves. They also know that they are responsible for their schoolwork. (She's sitting quietly in the living room, no TV, no music, doing her homework. She IS interrupted by texts from the boyfriend, though.)

I was never "taught" to study, but was expected to do well, and did. I think instilling a sense of responsibility from an early age helps. Too many parents now don't take responsibility for themselves, so they aren't modeling it for their children.

Schools these days are a multi-media extravaganza, with smartboards and computers everywhere. Even the textbooks tend to be disjointed, with too many sidebars and info boxes instead of straightforward text. (This extends to the ACLS teaching materials as well - it drives me nuts!) I think too much gets lost when it's presented this way. Maybe some kids feel a need for drugs to be able to focus in an educational world that is overloading them with stimuli, instead of a simpler presentation of information?

[finaldx]

I'm with Pangolin, I don't remember having to "learn" to study. I always found the material interesting. One of my favorite things in class was when the teacher would put the curled up film strip in that ancient projector and someone was supposed to forward it one frame when the "beep" showed up on the taped lecture. A lot of people considered it "lame" or whatever word was used then, but I LOVED them. Still enjoy lectures, the drier, the better. Book TV is on my favorite channel short list. In retrospect, I think I was the nerdiest of the nerds. Would not change a thing about that, either.

There was a series on PBS, called "Western Tradition". Eugen Weber of UCLA gave a series of something like a hundred, 30 minute lectures. We bought the entire set. Still enjoy them. Lots of information packed into each and every sentence he chose to present.

Here's the website: http://www.learner.org/resources/series58.html

Enjoy

We had a full set of encyclopedias and I read each one cover to cover, several times in the course of my childhood. Once you get used to really learning information, rather than what non-talent got busted for drugs, or showed her choochie-coo to the paparazzi, that other stuff seems lame.

[genrethan]

This is (obviously) a multifaceted question. As far as academic doping, it's one more way of cheating which students have done for as long as there has been education...that's not justifying it, it's simply stating a reality. Yes, there are those with a genuine need for psycho-stimulants to control attention/concentration deficits, but it is over-diagnosed and feigned to obtain these medications.

Education has changed. Some courses are still hard (will organic chemistry ever be a reason a college student cites as their reason to live?), but some of these courses are packing more content into less time without regard for the fact that students learning abilities and study habits are getting worse. This get more done in less time attitude is understandable because the U.S. is now 12th in the world in it's science education. The answer may be to increase the rate of education, but without addressing the fact that the majority of students have poor study habits, low expectations for themselves ("I just want to pass" or "I don't want to be a 'nerd' or interrupt my social life," etc.), treat school as a luxury they are forced to endure rather than a serious job, and the culture shift from seeing elders, especially teachers as persons to respect and admire to just public servants there to cater to them and make sure they pass, it will not stem the tide.

As much as technology helps, it can hurt as well. Technology only helps those who are serious students, whether by enhancing the learning experience, to assisting disabled students learn when they would otherwise be denied an education. Students who aren't serious are not benefited, rather they gain scads of new avenues to ease their studies and still pass a class without ever learning a thing. Example: Compare a student with serious social anxiety being assisted by distance education telecomm. tech. with a student who "writes" a 15 page "research" paper in one night with the assistance of pharmaceutical technology (prescribed speed), copy-and-pasting from the ever reliable Wikipedia, and then doing blind citations to make it look well researched. When you speak of the way things used to be, I don't think we could have imagined that students would be getting through school in this manner, and because they are doing it this way, we all pay the price.

Yes, I too was taught by my parents and my teachers that you sit down at a desk with a bright light, plenty of pencils, the textbooks, and a stack of notebooks. No music, no relaxing in bed with the laptop doing online studying with Facebook, IM, cell phone texting, calls, friends...etc. Humans aren't great multitaskers, but we pump the kids up with too much self-esteem, that they feel they can do anything and it should just come to them, then the teachers are blamed when the grades don't pass muster.

To much relative education standards--if the child feels good about themselves, that's all that matters. There is a relaxation in absolutes, even those of minimum attainment.

So of course, there will be the segment that has the chemical crutch, but my goodness that segment used to be small, relegated to individuals who knew no better or were in the minority as most had proper study skills--now it truly has exploded. We're losing talent, we're intelligence, we're losing our competitive edge...we're losing our future, both literally and figuratively.