B (124:10)
Oh, yeah, actually, I do give them messages all through the semester, which gets me in trouble. They're going to have to cope with. They're totally screwed up by phones, by AI, by social media. Literally. Their peripheral vision has shrunk physically. Their peripheral vision. That's called neuroplasticity. Your brain rewires because all you're doing is focusing on the phone. They'll sit in class and text each other so they're not learning. Somewhere out there in the world are kids who are not making this mistake and they will win. So I tell the class that you got to find a way to put your phone away. I'm not blaming you. It's not your fault. There is an entire industrial complex out there designed to get you to be glued to that phone. We raised you. It's not your fault. But you got to find a way to get rid of that phone. We are now in a mood to where secondary education is now starting to say no phones at school. At any point, they're starting to lock them up. And at one point they tried just saying no phones in class. The kids would run into the hall and pop open their phones and not talk to each other. So what I noticed last year, maybe it's just an aberrant year, I had 25 kids in a class, sophomores, Cornell kids. Right? These are kids who got into Cornell because not only because they were smart, but because they played football or they were, you know, editor of the yearbook or whatever. The entire class was shy. Every last one of them was shy. There was no kid in there who you say, oh, that's an unruly kid. I gotta, gotta, you know, because unruly kids can make A class, very entertaining. You know, they, they, they bring, they bring game and none of them, I'd make a joke and I, I voted class clown, so I can make jokes and I don't even bother anymore because I don't get anything. I get nothing. I go, maybe they've been trafficked. I don't know. And the blank stare, yeah, it's like they're on WeGovy or something. You know, the Wegovy eyes. And so they need to. I think their work ethic has fallen off a cliff. So when I was in college, I'd get up, I'd go to the library at 9, I'd come back to my fraternity for dinner and then I'd go back to Library maybe at 7:30, and then stay there till 11, then come home and maybe fuck around a little. And I did that seven days a week. Seven days a week. Now I was a little psychotic. I was not a good student in high school, but I said, okay, now I got to get my shit together. Now it's big league time. And it worked really well for me. And not everyone did that. But in my fraternity, 11 out of 12 went to grad school. So, you know, 11 out of 12 of the graduating class I happen to remember went to grad school and included guys like Rick Sherwin, founded Goldwyn Software Group. Brian Murdoch, who was, who was CEO of TD Asset Management. I mean, they were good people. I don't think the kids today really know how to work at all. They don't know how to read an exam question even. So if you say, okay, here's the setup. Bob does this, Joe does this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what's the answer? They literally go to the final line, say what's the answer? And say, I don't know how to do this. You go, you know those first couple of lines you skipped over? Because this is not a fucking email, right? This is not a how you doing? Email. This is a we're giving you information. And they don't read it. They just skip right over it and get to the message. The message, you know, the question. UCSD test. They're bringing SATs back. I remember when we took out SATs, I go, oh boy, this is stupid. There's problems with SATs, but taking them out is the wrong solution and UCSC is bringing it back. They did a study of the freshmen, they gave them a test and they found out there's something like 40% of the freshmen were not middle school level math. This is ucsd. UCSD is not A bad school, supposedly. So they gave an example. They said 25% of the kids missed the following question. Six plus three equals seven plus X. What is X? They missed that 25%. So I gave that question to my first grade grandchild. And he got it. He had to use his fingers a little. But, you know, that's a fundamental problem. It's fixable. I had a colleague who decided he was going to help the minority students. So this is not, this is not a well kept secret that, you know, if you're black, you get in easier, right? If someone wants to call that racist, have a fucking ball, you can suck my rectum, I don't care. But also, you don't want to bring a potentially talented kid who's not ready for the big leagues to Cornell and then destroy them. So you do not need women's studies here. The women aren't at a disadvantage. You don't need. You do need Africana studies. Because if you bring a kid to Cornell and you find out he can't be a physics major, you got to give him something. So you have Africana studies. Because that kid, to get him through, you get him the sheepskin, he will do okay. Because there's still a demand in society for a successful kid. He will do okay. But if you destroy them, you shouldn't have ever accepted them. So you need Africana studies. But one of my colleagues decided that they were failing badly. And he looked at the stats. Freshman chem, our monster freshman chem course, they were occupying C C minus zone. It was completely. We'd see a black chem major once every five years, right? We were destroying them in freshman chemistry. He set up a boot camp and he drilled them. And I said, how bad are they? And he said, I tell them New York to Chicago, 50 miles, 500 miles, 5,000 miles, about a third. A third? A third what? Yeah. You grow up in the hood, you don't know this shit. You could be smart as shit and you could really be trying to get it right, but you don't know this shit. It's. You are at a disadvantage that seems insurmountable. So he said, he says they can't add fractions, right? So he set up a boot camp to teach him how to take freshman chem. So like 100 kids in this class. And he pulled no punches. He really. It was like joining the Marines. And. And he also turned it into a. You can beat the white kids now. This guy's Asian. His father won the Nobel Prize in physics. He's Asian. My colleague, he got them into this. This is like, okay, you know how to drive to the hoop, right? You give me an athlete, I can turn him into a chemist. I guarantee you athletes do great in academia. You just have to turn on the competitive gene. And these kids not only went way up the charts in freshman chem, we monitored it. It carried through to their courses. We were starting to see graduating classes with five, six, seven black kids in the chem major. Where was the New York Times? I told guys who were working on this thing, I said, get the. I reached out to a reporter, said, would you write about it? Right? I go, where the is it? Because I wouldn't have believed it. So it really is the case. It just needed the right setting. But you also couldn't be a pussy about it. You couldn't say, well, we can't do this. And you know where he got flack from? The guy running it? He got flack from the minority industrial complex over in the arts college because they were not succeeding and he was invading their.
