Gen-Y Johnny Can't Read Nonverbal Cues

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/?emc=eta1

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203863204574348493483201758-lMyQjAxMDA5MDIwODEyNDgyWj.html

I want to do a "shout out", as my son's generation would say, for Stanley Fish who has a blog in the NY Times called "Think Again". He is also most accomplished academically at the highest level at some of the best universities. Stanley's 8/24 blog (attached) starts out, "A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college's composition program."

It has been my privilege to share my thoughts and my experience with some of the best and brightest of this current generation of college students (graduate and undergraduate) and I want to support Stanley's position that we don't emphasize the ability to write (effectively) enough. Stanley has subsequently been attacked for his position (perhaps by people who think he is being "elitist") and that's too bad because he's right. The best students we have ever had can write but not necessarily cogently. So, even there, we can help (and we have a method for doing that).

My thought on this is that, especially for the best schools, we think that our students are admitted with an ability to do the "basics". While I'm no expert, I think our colleges get students who are, in many cases, quantitatively exceptional and exceptional at "test taking" (SATs, etc.). Writing cogently is not emphasized and that's a shame because that skill is what gets you moving up the ladder no matter what you end up doing - it also forces you to prioritize how you talk about what you are doing because it engages a mental discipline that is not exclusive to "how" you write.

Speaking of "Gen-Y Johnny", as the article we've attached indicates, on September of 2008, Nielsen Mobile announced that teenagers with cellphones each sent and received, on average, 1742 text messages a month. A few months later, that tally was raised to 2,272. They read comments on Facebook, but they don't "read" each others' posture, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other nonverbal - and expressive - behaviors. Basically, this emphasis on social networking puts younger people at a face-to-face disadvantage, if not with themselves, at least with the generations ahead of them.

In the Silicon Valley, some companies have installed the "topless meeting" - in which not only laptops but iPhones and other tools are banned - to combat a new problem: "CONTINUOUS PARTIAL ATTENTION." As these companies have said, it's too easy to check email, stock quotes and Facebook. While a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as a silent dismissal. It announces: "I'm not interested."

Older employees might well accept such a ban, but younger ones might not understand it. Reading a text message in the middle of a conversation isn't a lapse to them - it's what you do. It has, they assume, no nonverbal meaning to anyone else. It does, of course, but how would they know it?

Lots of folks grumble about the diffidence, self-absorption and general uncommunicativeness of Generation Y. Perhaps, the next time we encounter someone who would rather "text" then talk when talking is the indicated form of communication, we could use that as a "teachable moment."

Last, I believe I saw last week that Utah has now passed a law that texting while driving is the equivalent of driving drunk. If that is, indeed, the case, they are probably right.