curiosity and initiative in students, with a side order of pride

Argh, yesterday's post apparently got filed in the ether. I sort of remember clicking on the publish key, but maybe I closed IE too soon thereafter?

What has happened in my online class (it happens in the regular classroom too but for some reason (less contact overall, probably) it's more noticeable (and annoying) online) is that students who don't know how to do a thing I have asked them to do simply don't do it. I ask them to submit a single file but they don't know how to cut and paste things: they submit 3 files. I ask for a Word file as an attachment but they are using macs and don't know how to Save As a word file: they dump all their work into the body of the email, with crazy-sloppy formatting. Or they are using a different program and submit whatever file format their program defaults to. (Which reminds me of a possible Curmudgeon Girl post on MS Works: wtf?)

This happens with more substantive matters too, like reading a text and not knowing what the words mean, but not looking them up. When I tell them college readers LOOK UP words they don't know - it's part of reading - they just shrug and look vacant.

I think that college-age students are more proactive about other aspects of their lives (let's hope) but it's so weird to me that they have so little curiosity about HOW to do things and so little desire to do them as expected. This is reflected in classroom behavior too: very passive, almost never any questions about content, just about "what do we have to know about this for the test? How long does our paper have to be?" etc.

Some educators take the position that we aren't making the content relevant enough, so that it becomes just a pointless memorize-and-forget exercise for students. I appreciate that, and I've gradually modified the content of my courses to try to reflect issues and questions that I think students should be interested in. Nevertheless, I am leery of the position that student inclinations about relevance should govern content. Their worlds seem very narrow to me and I think it is part of my job to open up the doors and windows and let some new ideas in.