Observations on millennial undergraduates.

This year it seems like a lot of the millennial undergraduates are rather immature for their age.

There's always been some of that, maybe 0-2 out of 30-some, but this year it feels like 4-6 out of 30-some.

They talk to each other in class, or have weird fragile egos, or spin their pens on their hands nervously and prominently in the middle of class.

The other week, one girl was holding out a strand of her hair and twirling it, while chewing gum!

It really does set a tone more like a high school classroom and not college, so much.

I think this happens at other places, but at the "elite" college I teach at?  It's weird.  Honestly, where do these kids come from?

It really does feel more and more like a dodged a bullet, by not pursuing becoming a professor.  I can't imagine being beholden to students like this, for decades.

I was texting about this with my one (modern Czech literature) professor friend, and she said maybe more of them are more immature, but that the thing that really bothers her with millennials is that they "lack affect" (i.e. that they don't show the same range of emotion as past generations).

She's also wondering if they'll understand themes about the repressiveness of the communist state, in some of the 20th c. lit that she's teaching for the first time in eons.