For new university students, Jerry Garcia has always been dead

As professors, we realize that our students stay the same age, but we don't. Keeping up with the latest is tough

Kristina Chew

Every fall the same thing happens: I say "salvete!" (hello in Latin) to a classroom of college students. The students are roughly the same age as they were last year, the year before, and all the other years back to the 1990s when I started teaching.
But I'm older, now the age of their parents. Sometimes I console myself that at least I'm not the age of their grandparents, but I know it's only a matter of time.
At many a training session for faculty, mention is made of the Mindset List, which seeks to reveal the world view and values of today's 18-year olds. Tom McBride and Ron Nief, an English professor and a now-retired administrator at Wisconsin's Beloit College, started compiling the list in 1998 to gently remind ageing professors like me that saying "groovy!" probably wouldn't get us very far with students.
The list for the Class of 2017 (freshmen born in 1995) came out today. Like previous lists, this year's remarks on the ephemerality of pop culture figures, the mutability of language and the myriad of ways that technology is intertwined (entrenched) in our lives.
To students entering the class of 2017, Jerry Garcia has always been dead.
They don't hear "chicken pox" and think "extremely painful and unpleasant childhood rite of passage". But Chicken Little? Oh yeah, that kid who got knocked out of American Idol a couple years ago.
To the class of 2017, Java doesn't mean coffee but software.
GM is something eco-people say we shouldn't eat.
Lockdown drills are as routine as fire drills: these students were babies when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred and toddlers when the Columbine High shooting happened.
Their family pet has a microchip and they've had an "electronic lifeline" (a cell phone) to mom and dad since middle school.
In their lifetime, the US has, as the new list says, "always been trying to figure out which side to back in Middle East conflicts". They get their news by following the Twitter feeds of activists (and Beloit alumnae) like Maryam and Zainab al-Khawaja (who is currently in prison in Bahrain) or from their own family members in Syria.
Students in the class of 2017 know you do everything on the internet. They chat on Skype and pay via Paypal. Wikipedia has always been there to look things up on.
See a student using a smart phone in class? They may not be texting a friend in the next row or in Kathmandu but "reading the assignment they should have read last night, or ... recording every minute of their college experience".
If you are 40-something-ish like me, reading such items in the most recent Mindset List is bound to make you feel old.
As I'm heading towards middle age, I've concluded that any attempt to keep up with my students is futile. I have to face the facts that I make cultural references (Davy Crockett and the pioneers) that no students understand.
I am, though, a classicist. Studying the ancient Greeks and Romans teaches you that some things never change. Young people (the horserace-loving Pheidippides in the 5th century BC, Aristophanes' satiric comedy, Clouds; the dandy curling and perfuming his hair to increase his sex appeal in Ovid's Art of Love) have always been baffling the older generation with their newfangled pursuits.
Wanting his son to learn something useful, Strepsiades, Pheidippides' father, packs him off to the Phrontisterion ("thinking factory") where the young student learns a bit more than had been bargained for from the resident teacher, Socrates.
The class of 2017 may think "tablet" means an iPad sort of device and not "something you take in the morning" per the new Mindset List. But as I tell my students, a tabula was the wax board that Roman school boys learned their declensions on. Wiped clean it was a tabula rasa or "blank slate", a phrase that has come to signify an open mind ready to be writ on by experience.
Those entering university today know a lot. Perhaps it's my job now to teach them an old truth: everything new can be old again.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/2017-mindset-list-feeling-old

He's been dead for nearly 20 years, it's not just 'new' university students.

As someone who went to uni in the early '90s, I have to ask: Who is Jerry Garcia?

The point is 'always'

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Edited by Joffa: 9/9/2013 01:13:37 PM

Edited by Joffa: 9/9/2013 01:14:04 PM

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Great, now Joffa's going to post 10-15 fucking Grateful Dead videos.

I thought about it, and decided not to do that, but then you went and said that...


This is for Afro


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Edited by Joffa: 9/9/2013 01:11:53 PM

So you decide to prove me right. Well fuck...you sure showed me.

Yeah honestly who the fuck is this guy?

-PB

Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American musician who was best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead.

Though he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or "spokesman" of the group.

One of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead for their entire thirty-year career (1965–1995). Garcia also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders-Garcia Band (with longtime friend Merl Saunders), Jerry Garcia Band, Old and in the Way, the Garcia/Grisman acoustic duo, Legion of Mary, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage (which Garcia co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson).

He also released several solo albums, and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician. He was well known by many for his distinctive guitar playing and was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" cover story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Garcia


Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California.[1][2] The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, improvisational jazz, psychedelia, and space rock,[3][4] and for live performances of long musical improvisation.[5][6] "Their music," writes Lenny Kaye, "touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists."[7] These various influences were distilled into a diverse and psychedelic whole that made the Grateful Dead "the pioneering Godfathers of the jam band world".[8] They were ranked 57th in the issue The Greatest Artists of all Time by Rolling Stone magazine.[9] They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994[10] and their Barton Hall Concert at Cornell University (May 8, 1977) was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.[11] The Grateful Dead have sold more than 35 million albums worldwide.

The founding members of the Grateful Dead were Jerry Garcia (guitar, vocals), Bob Weir (guitar, vocals), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, vocals), Phil Lesh (bass, vocals), and Bill Kreutzmann (drums).[12] Members of the Grateful Dead had played together in various San Francisco bands, including Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and The Warlocks. Lesh was the last member to join the Warlocks before they became the Grateful Dead; he replaced Dana Morgan Jr., who had played bass for a few gigs. With the exception of McKernan, who died in 1973, the core of the band stayed together for its entire 30-year history.[13] Other longtime members of the band include Mickey Hart (drums 1967–1971, 1974–1995), Keith Godchaux (keyboards 1971–1979), Donna Godchaux (vocals 1972–1979), Brent Mydland (keyboards 1979–1990), and Vince Welnick (keyboards 1990–1995).
The fans of the Grateful Dead, some of whom followed the band from concert to concert for years, are known as "Deadheads" and are known for their dedication to the band's music.[5][6] The group's fans, and subsequently the band itself, were closely associated with the hippie movement and were seen as a form of institution in the culture of America for many years. Former members of the Grateful Dead, along with other musicians, toured as The Dead in 2003, 2004, and 2009 after touring as The Other Ones in 1998, 2000, and 2002. There are many contemporary incarnations of the Dead, with the most prominent touring acts being Furthur and Phil Lesh & Friends.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grateful_Dead

And why is he meant to be so famous?

What has this got to do with University students?

-PB

In other breaking news, to University students Isaac Newton has always been dead, Harold Holt has always been missing and Green Day have always been shit.

Green Day are awesome.

inb4 Maxi conniption fit.

> Makes controversial claim
> Doesn't substantiate it
> OP clearly a fag

They haven't put out a good album since Nimrod.

dealwithit.jpg

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Edited by Joffa: 10/9/2013 07:43:55 AM

Love the dead! American beauty is one of the greatest Albums of all time, though, if you don't like folk music you may disagree.