College students and the Grammys

It was an informal survey, of course, but I really did not expect what it revealed.

During the past two days, I have polled about 80 students in four sections of English 102 at Coastal Carolina University.

I asked questions like, "Did you watch the Grammys? Who watched the Grammys?"

I was thinking, "Who wouldn't watch the Grammys?"

The 51st Annual Grammy Awards included live performances by U2, Lil Wayne, M.I.A., Coldplay, Jennifer Hudson, Carrie Underwood, Katie Perry, and several more recording artists who (surely) are familiar to folks in their late teens and early twenties.

So how many of my English 102 students watched the Grammys?

In one class, I might have had six hands in the air. In the other three classes, fewer than five raised their hands.

Some of those hands came with comments like, "I watched some of it."

These classes are mostly populated with freshmen.

I think music must be getting more democratic, less hierarchical. After all, the Grammys is a marquee event for popular culture, and most of the English 102 students didn't stop to watch.

I often use examples from popular films in my classes because there are some movies that nearly everyone has seen.

But music? It's less likely that everyone has heard the same songs or loaded the same tunes onto their MP3 players.

Movies still have big advertising and marketing campaigns, and still have distribution routes that keep viewers on a tight leash. If you want to see a new Hollywood movie, most of the time you have to go to the cinema.

But music? A televised, annual event with live performances by big-name recording artists can't draw much more than two percent to three percent of my students.

Or, you could say, movies have a portability problem that indirectly allows some of them to become popular in ways that songs and even recording artists cannot.

It's easy to listen to music on small devices, but movies (once they've made their run in the cinemas) require at least a small screen to view. You can't watch that small screen while you're driving, but you can listen to music just about anywhere, just about anytime.

The portability of music and the convenience of transporting allows the proliferation of distribution routes and low-cost, or free, or pirated downloads. Spend a few minute on the Web and you'll find dozens of bands that are new to you. Some band sites on MySpace will allow you to download select MP3s for free.

But all that is just well-worn speculation about the impact of technological changes.

I'm just surprised more of those students weren't watching the Grammys.

Missing the CCU students

This past fall semester was my first time teaching as a college instructor. Did you really think the Beerman column paid all the bills? Ha!

I was teaching composition and literature classes at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.

I taught five sections of three courses -- and drove to campus six days a week (that sixth day would be a three-hour long Saturday morning class).

I was never entirely successful at getting all my students to be quiet when I was lecturing --

Or to quit sending text messages from their phones during class periods.

And yet -- strangely enough -- I miss them.

Yeah, yeah -- I know -- they do NOT miss me.

They just wanted to get that English or humanities requirement out of the way.

And yet -- strangely enough -- I miss them.

And I wish them well this coming New Year and spring semester.

(P.S. I'm on Facebook!)

Privacy versus student health, campus safety

Today's Wall Street Journal includes an article entitled "Bucking Privacy Concerns, Cornell Acts as Watchdog."

The Virginia Tech shootings have moved campus safety to the top of university administrators' priorities.

Is Cornell creating a safe environment, or an environment of busy-bodies? Maybe a little of both, but there's not doubt the new approach has helped some students. Here are some excerpts from the article:

For 19 years as a custodian at Cornell University, Sue Welch has been taking out the garbage and mopping the floors of residence halls. Recently, she added a new responsibility: trying to prevent student suicide.

Ms. Welch noticed during a recent semester that she was repeatedly having to clean up after a particular student's apparent bouts of nausea, and told her supervisor she feared the young woman had an eating disorder. The supervisor told the residence-hall director, who encouraged the student to go to the university health center. Counselors there arranged for her to get treatment for bulimia nervosa. Ms. Welch credits the training sessions that she and other custodians attended on how to spot students with mental-health problems....

[Cornell University's] "alert team" of administrators, campus police and counselors meets weekly to compare notes on signs of student emotional problems. People across campus, from librarians to handymen, are trained to recognize potentially dangerous behavior. And starting this year, Cornell is taking advantage of a rarely used legal exception to student-privacy rights: It is assuming students are dependents of their parents, allowing the school to inform parents of concerns without students' permission....

By 2002, the executive director of Cornell's health center, Janet Corson-Rikert, began making mental health a communitywide responsibility. The 1999 shootings at Columbine High School had shocked educators into recognizing the danger of failing to spot troubled students. Like most colleges, Cornell was starting to see more students enrolled with severe mental-health problems, as reduced stigma and improved medications allowed more of them to reach college. The counseling center was often overwhelmed with demand for appointments.

Dr. Corson-Rikert asked Dr. [Timothy] Marchell [director of mental-health initiatives] and others to build a network to train people to notice problems and give them ways to report them, while still respecting student privacy. An advisory council on mental-health strategies made up of Cornell staff, faculty and student leaders had its first meeting in early 2004, and members had a realization: In school post-mortems after tragedies, "each person knew pieces of the story but no one saw the whole picture," says Dr. Marchell. "If they had shared the information, maybe we could have intervened."

Dr. Marchell spoke with several suicide-prevention organizations, who pointed the school to a surprising model: the Air Force.

In the 1990s, the service decided to try to reduce suicides by airmen and studied each case for warning signs. They learned to look at behavior changes, discipline problems and poor performance ratings as possible indicators of depression. Four-star generals began to talk publicly about mental illness and encourage all service members to watch for warning signs. Each member of the Air Force is now given training in detecting depression and other mental disorders. The Air Force's protocol is one of few suicide-prevention programs proven effective: The average annual suicide rate dropped by a third, from 13.5 per 100,000 people to 9.9.