by Kevin Oberlin, PhD

The gap in expectations between teachers and students in the classroom appears to be widening.  As a first-year composition teacher, I most frequently perceive this gap as an unearned sense of entitlement on the students’ part.  On the whole, this perception is not incorrect.  Generation Me, one of the common text selections for beginning composition courses, provides mounting evidence to support the argument that today’s teens to twenty-somethings have been reared to expect that the world owes them success because they are each special and unique, a logical impossibility.

Indeed, first-year composition students on the whole seem to approach the classroom with the sense that course content will be presented to them at best, and inflicted upon them at worst.  In either case, they will walk away from the course having learned something they didn’t particularly care to learn, and something they don’t particularly need to know.  Even teachers attuned to this attitude, who often rightly emphasize to their students that they must earn their education rather than expect it to be given to them, often continue to use language that unwittingly reinforces students’ sense of entitlement.  While such teachers might never say that they are forcing their students to learn, they will often still explain what a particular assignment “forces” students to do so that students will develop a certain skill set.