The Mindset List -- Recalibrating Your Mind For The Class Of 2015 (Beloit.edu)

Every year the good professors at Beloit College publish a mindset list.  The purpose is to help old fogeys like me (and maybe you -- if you have kids, check with them) understand why their hip references to Two Live Crew and "Bueller? Bueller?" fall flat with incoming freshmen...uh, sorry, fresh-people.

This year's list is no different and a few of them really jumped out at me:

• Andre the Giant, River Phoenix, Frank Zappa, Arthur Ashe and the Commodore 64 have always been dead.
• There have nearly always been at least two women on the Supreme Court, and women have always commanded U.S. Navy ships.
• As they’ve grown up on websites and cell phones, adult experts have constantly fretted about their alleged deficits of empathy and concentration.
• Amazon has never been just a river in South America.
• Grown-ups have always been arguing about health care policy.
• Russian courts have always had juries.
• They’ve always wanted to be like Shaq or Kobe: Michael Who?

The full list is available on the Beloit website.

A Little Bit Of Pre-term Perspective (Beloit and YouTube)

Beloit College put out its annual mindset list this week. The purpose of the list is to act "as a reminder of the rapidly changing frame of reference for this new generation." Beloit uses the list as a way to help their faculty get inside the heads of the incoming freshmen and to explicitly recognize that some of the cultural touchstones of a 50 year old professor are not the cultural touchstones of an 18 year old student.

For 18 year olds coming to college this year, Beloit notes, for example, that IBM has never made typewriters and there has always been GPS. Beloit just about killed me last year when they noted that the Soviet Union had never existed for those freshmen. This year, in turn, it suddenly hit me that the incoming freshmen were 11 years old when 9/11 happened. How much do you remember from when you were 11?

If that is not enough perspective for you, then check out the video made by the always incisive Dr. Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State University: