Pirate's Booty: An ex-Jack Sparrow spills on life at the Magic Kingdom

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by mmaddog

The nerve.....

I just came back from a NACM (National Association of Credit Management) convention where we had a speaker by the name of Cam Marston. He has a book out called Motivating the "What's In It for Me? Workforce". In it he describes the 4 Generations in the workforce and how each differs in it's view of how they operate. At first glance I thought it would be boring, but I found it very enlightening and the speaker was highly entertaining. And boy does he hit the bull's eye on today's workforce....here is the link to his website in case you want to read a little about it.

http://www.cammarston.com/

mmaddog
*******

As a teacher of the younger generation, I can only tell you that it's going to get worse. I feel like such an old bastard when I start ranting about "kids these days," but I really do feel there is some validity to it. I saw a recent article in a paper that talked about some of the characteristics of the generation. They called them the "snow plow" generation, because their parents have basically cleared all obstacles from their paths their entire lives. As such, they have unrealistically low expectations as to what it takes to succeed in life and unrealistically high expectations for their futures.

Case in point: I had about 10 cases of plagiarism this year. Two of the parents contacted me after my initial contact reporting the infraction. Both parents insisted that their kids wouldn't and didn't plagiarize (despite me printing up the websites that they plagiarized and highlighting the exact unattributed quotes). I spent upwards of 3 hours on the phone with one parent before finally getting him to leave me alone and "agreeing to disagree" as to what constitutes plagiarism. During that hellacious endurance test, it came out that the dad had actually written the paper for his son who "has problems in school." So it was, in fact, his dad who had plagiarized on top of writing the paper for his kid. He told me that in the business world what he did wasn't plagiarism, that they claim other people's work as theirs all the time without giving them credit. His dad just didn't feel that it was fair that his son was given a zero for the assignment, since he'd put in so much hard work on it. I was completely disgusted and it was very telling as to many of the problems I deal with daily in the classroom.