Dog Days...Those Hazy, Lazy, Crazy Days of Summer

You've seen/read this before: each year, a professor and a professor emeritus from Beloit College in Wisconsin publish this list of mostly pop culture items dealing with the incoming freshman class. They do so to enable professors to avoid making assumptions about what each student knows or has experienced. The list has come under attack recently as being trite, lacking any academic value and/or boring since the format is generally the same. Whatever...the annual list generates millions of hits on the college website, and the two professors claim that detractors are few. Me? I'm too lazy to think of something myself, so here's the list from 2013.

The Beloit College Mindset List of 2017

For this generation of entering college students, born in 1995, Dean Martin, Mickey Mantle and Jerry Garcia have always been dead.

1. Eminem and LL Cool J could show up at parents' weekend.

2. They are the sharing generation, having shown tendencies to share everything, including possessions, no matter how personal.

3. GM means food that is Genetically Modified.

4. As they started to crawl, so did the news across the bottom of the television screen.

5. "Dude" has never had a negative tone.

6. As their parents held them as infants, they may have wondered whether it was the baby or Windows 95 that had them more excited.

7. As kids they may well have seen Chicken Run but probably never got chicken pox.

8. Having a chat has seldom involved talking.

9. Gaga has never been baby talk.

10. They could always get rid of their outdated toys on eBay.