So the journey begins...

Welcome to AnyU!

Rebekah, a professor of Anthropology at AnyU decides that during her sabbatical year, she is going to enroll as a student at her own university.   This decision is sparked during a few classes that she had chosen to audit.  Because she went to class regularly, took notes, read the readings and raised her hand to ask questions, many of the students assumed she was a student herself.  These students began sharing opinions and gossip with her that she would have never heard as a professor.  As a professor over the years, she started noticing how students were changing.  She began wondering why students never came in for office hours, unwilling to do research outside of the classroom, and how good manners seemed to be checked at the door.  Rebekah had been a professor for 14 years, and was in her 50s when she decided to take on this ethnography project.  Going "undercover" wasn't the easiest task.  

During her first few weeks as a freshman, she had to overcome a few boundaries.  First, even though she was around college students daily, her language was much different.  She struggled with making friends, because she didn't understand their lingo, and they spoke so quickly, she wasn't always able to understand them.  She quickly related these barriers to those she faced when she studied in a foreign village. Something interesting I found was that another anthropologist, Connie Eble found that in a "seven-year span (1980-87), only 10% of a college slang lexicon remained in use, and over fifteen years (1972-87), only four out of two hundred words stayed the same". (pp. 13).  

Another boundary was that she felt like a foreigner on her own campus.  Where she thought she knew the layout of campus and where everything was, as a student, the campus was much different.  She was accustomed to parking in the faculty parking lots, and entering the building on the 'street-side' as opposed to the 'walking mall' side.  She was now forced to park only in the lot near her dorm and had to walk or take campus transportation to her classes.  

The first chapter has made me begin to wonder a few things...Are college students of their own culture, and how do college professors teach through this cultural barrier?  How have students changed over the years, and why are we do disconnected from our professors, who are our direct link to information in the classroom?