General Discussion

I'm in a nursing program at the moment. This semester, it required five days in person (3 lecture, 2 clinical at hospital). The thing is, the program was usually four days in person, Tue-Fri. They would have four to five hour lecture on Friday. This semester, they split that into 3 hours Friday, 2 hours Monday.

We literally went to school on Mondays for functionally 90 minutes of lecture that very, very easily could have been a Zoom meeting. Particularly for students with commutes of over an hour each way. It's just power point slides about the textbook.

The director of the program specifically said, "We wanted to do it this way, because nursing is a person-to-person profession, and students need to be person-to-person as well."

So they didn't need to stretch the week to five days for logistical purposes. They did it to promote connection.

Yeah, my classmates rioted when they found that one out.

We're back to four days a week next semester.

I get the director's point, I do. And I don't live very far from school, so I couldn't care less. But many of these people are programmed to be isolative because of technology. It's not necessarily that school doesn't promote connection. It's that students are coming in not wanting that. And when you make them interact in ways they view as unnecessary, they get real, real cranky about it.

You can enlist as many counselors, social researchers, and activities administrators as you want, but if the students want no part of it, you're just throwing money down the drain. The problem seems to be that kids are arriving at college pre-programmed by technology and social media in such a way that community and cohesion are not things that exist in their world. It would be interesting to see how a college could try mandating that. But these are, by then, adults. And adults get spiky when you tell them they have to participate in ancillary activities. See: Any superfluous work meeting ever.

It's definitely a pickle. But I think this is a "Technology is changing people's social brains" thing. Unless you root that out - starting in childhood - all this is risking pissing money into the wind.