This is a very sad first hand account of a visiting professor at a small, historically Black university in Alabama. The apathy he describes in many of the students he encounters I believe is a result of the family and social situations in which the students were raised, but sadly I think that some readers of this article will quickly attribute it to race (just read the comments--hooee). It's an interesting read, though, and I recommend that you also link back and read his article about his first year there (I'm linking to the second year's reprisal).

We always talk about the culture of literacy on the job and how it affects academic performance. I was very lucky to be brought up in a family where books are treasured and abounded, newspapers were strewn about, and magazines were stacked up against one another. The world is your oyster, kid. One of my nostalgic favorites is Little Women, which my parents gave me in 1984 (the year I turned 8) in a beautiful hardcover version which I still have somewhere. One of my dad's friends regularly gifted us with Penguin classics he found in the bookstores of Pakistan, where we were at the time. One of them was My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell, and that book remains one of my beloved classics which I never would have discovered on my own. I constantly realize how lucky I was to have stumbled into a family that reads, when I see so many of my sweet and curious kids have homes starved of books and reading.

The article touches a lot on intellectual curiosity and how it is lacking in so many college students. I admit that I was guilty of phoning it in during some of my classes, and imagine that my professors were...less than impressed. Maybe things felt less pressing or something. I regret that I didn't suck the marrow out of the opportunity more then, but so much of college also revolved around one's social life. With some relief I can say that my intellectual curiosity has been fired up again working in my current field. I find myself reading research in my downtime on child language. I guess because it's interesting, but also because I can put it to USE now. Still not loving my geology course (that is almost over, praise the gods), but at least I'm trying to absorb some of it.