jaybird3rd

Besides functional illiteracy, common sense has taken a nosedive. They tend to stand around scratching their heads instead of solving problems. We had an older client in our front entrance who was saying she felt like she was going to faint, and the 2 20 somethings we have up there working that area were conferencing for like 5 minutes. Luckily I had overheard, so I brought a chair out for her. Turns out she has low blood sugar, so I bought her a candy bar out of our vending machine in the break room. Left up to them, she probably would've collapsed in our front entrance area possibly breaking a hip and/or hitting her head.

^ Yes, I see this, too.  Example: I assigned the class a simple database-backed Web application, and some students (depending on their configuration) had an issue which caused the application to throw an exception.  The solution, which they would have found after a superficial search, involved making a simple change to their MySQL configuration; at most, a ten-second fix.  But instead of researching it themselves, some of them contacted me in a panic right away; others just stopped and did nothing more with the assignment until the last hours of the due date, when they asked me for an extension without offering any explanation.

If I was an employer looking at a résumé from someone who used acronyms and incorrectly spells words like "loose" instead of "lose", it will be very unlikely I'd hire that person.   I even got an e-mail one day from someone who used what I mentioned above when I was looking for piano students.  I didn't bother answering the e-mail.