According to an article from the Huffington Post, students are getting lazier when it comes to their schoolwork. A student posted on Yahoo Answers that she needed a full summary and list of important parts of DC Pierson’s “The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To.” She claims she didn’t have time to finish it.
“I REALLY need this! AND it’s not because I’m slacking,” she said in the post.
Pierson himself responded to her post, causing a national reaction to the situation. He lightly reprimanded her and explained that his book actually has “a ton more sex, swearing, and drugs than anything else you have been or will be assigned in high school.”
Many other people commented on the thread, both reprimanding and encouraging the student to read. The article went on to comment on school reading level statistics being quite low in the U.S.
Perhaps this is because our generation has a world of knowledge right at our fingertips. One click of the mouse and most questions can be answered instantly. With resources like Google, Yahoo Answers, Ask.com and others, it could be that students are not challenging themselves anymore. A few Georgia State students, who prefer to remain unnamed, shared some ways that they cut corners in school.
“Sometimes I get overwhelmed with my workload. There are some things that just won’t get done unless I use the internet as a resource,” said a senior student.
But it can’t all be the fault of the students. After all, they are only utilizing the tools in front of them. Farmers use wheelbarrows to transport things that they don’t want to carry. Mathematicians use calculators so they don’t have to write everything on paper. None of these people are considered lazy for using the inventions that benefit them.
“I Google everything just to double-check myself,” a junior student said.
Perhaps students have wizened up to the fact that they can find almost any straight answer online. They know the areas of their schoolwork that they have to spend more time focusing on, and those they don’t. With the insane demand placed on students as a direct result of the economy, students have to optimize the time they have.
“Fake it ’til you make it,” said a sophomore student.
So, perhaps the Internet needs to be accepted for what it is: a gigantic tool. It’s a body of free and useful information and knowledge. It is the responsibility of teachers to give assignments that the Internet can’t answer. That’s not to say that everything is the fault of the teachers-it’s a combination of students, teachers and demand. Of course, there are lazy students out there, but there are lazy everybodys out there.
