Another part of this is thinking about my own parenting style. It's automatic to me that from the time the kids were very young, if they made an observation or something, I often just asked, "why? why?" and got them to come up with reasons. As in, I was curious, not judgmental and making them defend their answer. So I didn't argue their reasons or something.

Pokey is now playing AllStars, under coaches that are SUPER-not from the why? why? school of parenting, and Jammies reports that they are vaguely confused and irritated by his entitlement to know why. I remember that I was irritating to adults in this same way. It's a tricky dynamic.

At least on the parenting side of things, I have observed that there is an extremely short distance between feeling entitled to an explanation they understand - to know why - and feeling entitled to an explanation that they agree with. Which means that "asking why" no longer feels as sincere to me - I know that a lot of the time it's really a form of arguing, not asking to understand.

I broadly agree with the OP. I'd add, for the adult students I've had, their awareness that they are customers paying for a service. Also for them, and for the brighter children, I'd broaden the OP slightly, to say that such students come to class already knowing a high-level answer to "Why?": because the material will be useful, and understanding it beyond pattern recognition will increase usefulness.

Speaking English is useful because it's easier to make puns in than most other languages.

M has been teaching (adjuncting) for the past few years, and we talk about this issue a lot, although he thinks of it more as "understanding what school is for," which is definitely correlated with privileged or entitlement although not exactly the same thing. By and large it's the UMC white kids and returning/older students who come prepared to take advantage of whatever the program has to offer. The first-generation college students tend to either think that college is a continuation of high school, where they have to just check off a bunch of boxes to graduate,* or else think of school as a venue for self-expression. Like, M will invite a prominent curator to talk to his class, and half the class will not show up because this is not material they will be graded on, and the other half will uninformedly try to challenge the curator about their museum's complicity in environmental injustice, or whatever.

It's frustrating for me to hear about, not least because M teaches visual arts. If you're a first generation college student from a poor family studying art, you should really, really want to do this. It's not like a BFA or MFA is an economically useful degree!

*This was me in college. I remember being so lost, and so terrified of failure, and so afraid of looking stupid. Fortunately I was dogged and lucky enough to get through fine. M ended up dropping out of college and returning as an older student, by which time he knew exactly what he wanted to get out of school.

I thought M was a violinist! Am I misremembering?

I love the thought of M as a violinist! He definitely does not know how to play the violin.

When was the last time you checked?

First, there's a lot of obvious maturity, time-management skills, and willingness to buckle down that come with time.

Speaking as a 40 year old who's been doing a bachelor's teaching degree now for 4 years: Hahahahahhahhahhahahah! Uhm, not always!

Could you try harder for the sake of her argument?

9: Self-loathing aside, are you not to a significant degree engaged in arbitrary box-checking required by the Altreich?

9: compared to yourself at 18?

That's a very useful concept, though I'm not sure I really think of it as entitlement. And it's not just understanding the material--- I've started telling all my advisees that if they can't get into a class they need to graduate (or a prereq that will cause trouble later if they don't get it now), they should tell me and get me to help, not just decide that they'll have to postpone graduation.

Though there are also the returning students (not just, but disproportionately) who are entitled in a bad way. I had to explicitly tell one that when I said for them to talk to each other about the readings for a minute, he needed to talk to the other students and not to me.

7: I have no idea what gave me that impression then! I had a notion that he's someone who spent hours and hours practicing. But I probably just read things to fit what I was primed to think!

As an undergrad, I was barely a box-checker. As a law student, I was paying them a ton of money and wanted to make sure they taught me everything there was.

returning student entitlement to-the-max:

i really really pissed off a con law scholar by telling him he was a bad teacher bc a large proportion of the class had no fucking idea what he was talking about & i knew it bc they were all asking me to explain it to them (based on my conversations with the prof in class convincing then i did understand, although often disagreed with, the dude), & as the mother of a newborn i really didn't have time to act as his unofficial, uncompensated ta so would he mind stepping up his game? only moderate success with this one.

told the torts prof his overtly salacious obsession with monica lewinsky was immature & inappropriate & as a paying customer i objected to having to sit through it, so knock it off or i'd have a chat with the dean of students. worked, at least for that semester. i'm certain he went right back to it afterwards.

16: That sounds like appropriately entitled returning student--- that's the level of teaching that you indeed SHOULD have. The student that really pissed me off seemed to WANT to be my unofficial uncompensated TA--- so I should meet in private and teach him, so that he could explain stuff to the rest of the class. And he got really angry when I wanted to explain things to the whole class at once, and not separately to him first.

17: oh we had those in law school too! we called them "heavily indebted philosophy phds". 🤣🤣🤣

although have to hand it to my classmates, my 1l large group included a brilliant literature phd, an older russian immigrant whi was hilarious, mom of three, heavy smoker with gorgeous low low soft gravelly voice. she always sat at the front of the class. her interchanges with profs were so consistently excellent & enlightening that every time she so much as murmured the amount of vicious shushing, holding of breath, leaning forward ... just awesome. profs would be reduced to repeating every word she said, sloooowly, before they were allowed to continue.

i am forever grateful to her for not telling me the story of her first child's birth in a moscow hospital until *after* i had my kid.

There is a difference between students who exhibit the kind of entitlement that you note and those who don't, but I haven't found in my experience that it tracks whether someone is non-trad or not. Some non-trad students are profoundly self-conscious about their status (e.g., 40-something woman returning to college at the same time her daughter is starting) and it hamstrings everything they try. There are also a lot of bright privileged kids who think of everything as a series of hoops to jump through (sometimes this bites them badly when it turns out their dream requires actually knowing math.)

I'm getting old and cranky, but in my mind lately there are two relevant kinds of people: people who are going to succeed no matter what the world throws at the them, and people who are going to wilt at the first chance they have a setback. The wilters can be privileged or not; the only difference that privilege grants is whether wilting means they have a soft landing or a second chance. I don't want to minimize the first generation stuff -- getting someone to become acculturated to how college works is one of the harder problems to crack* -- but there's a decent amount of garden variety failure-to-get-one's act together that drives a lot of problems.

*it's actually easy to solve with lots of advising, but the solution is expensive and doesn't scale well so we buy software packages instead.

First, there's a lot of obvious maturity, time-management skills, and willingness to buckle down that come with time.

I don't have to say I've definitely got worse at this over the years, but I have to admit I'd have to think hard before I'd say I got better...

I've gotten better at putting myself in fewer positions where I'm required to do stuff I hate.

The word "entitled" has acquired a negative connotation, but it's not bad to act entitled to something you actually are entitled to. If I'm a paying customer at Krispy Kreme, I'm entitled to my donut. If I'm a US citizen, I'm entitled to vote. If I'm a renter, I'm entitled to quiet enjoyment of my apartment. It's a good thing if students act entitled to understanding of the material, as long as they put in the proper level of work.

"Entitled" as a pejorative description is short for "entitled to what isn't yours" or "entitled to something you haven't earned" or "entitled to something you don't deserve."

19.2 seems excessively cranky to me. I've wilted before, and I've succeeded despite adversity before. A person isn't just always going to wilt, or always going to succeed, in every adverse situation they encounter. There are lots of possible outcomes other than succeeding or wilting. You can partially succeed. You can end up failing despite tremendous perseverance. You can handle one kind of adversity with tenacity and grace, and be hopelessly outmatched by a different kind of adversity.

I'm not sure it's entitled. I think it's that they realize that they CAN learn something that seems hard. They say that mathematics teaches people that it sometimes takes more than 15 seconds to get an answer. Growing up teaches something similar. It might take hard work, hunting up resources, getting another explanation, but one can learn it. I'll bet more entitled kids have a bit of this too, because they've grown up knowing that they can afford to fail. They'll get bailed out and get another try and another if they need it. For the less mature or less entitled, it's all a minefield. One false step and it's game over, and maybe in ten years or so you might realize that you can cobble together a second try.

22 is good

Today's US Supreme Court decision turned on the definition of the word 'entitled.'

A cop did a license plate look-up for money -- does it violate federal law for him to access the computer system for a purpose other than law enforcement? No, says Justice Barrett. You're nuts, says Justice Thomas, joined by Alito and Roberts.

So, who won overall?

The cop's conviction was overturned, so that's a win for him. Whether you're a winner depends on whether you embellish dating profiles, play solitaire on work computers, or plan delete everything on the company on the company computers when you resign.

Barrett and Thomas present dueling scenario characterizations of the opposing views.

Barrett:

If the "exceeds authorized access" clause criminalizes every violation of a computer-use policy, then millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens are criminals. Take the workplace. Employers commonly state that computers and electronic devices can be used only for business purposes. So on the Government's reading of the statute, an employee who sends a personal e-mail or reads the news using her work computer has violated the CFAA. Or consider the Internet. Many websites, services, and databases--which provide "information" from "protected computer[s]," §1030(a)(2)(C)--authorize a user's access only upon his agreement to follow specified terms of service. If the "exceeds authorized access" clause encompasses violations of circumstance-based access restrictions on employers' computers, it is difficult to see why it would not also encompass violations of such restrictions on website providers' computers. And indeed, numerous amici explain why the Government's reading of subsection (a)(2) would do just that--criminalize everything from embellishing an online-dating profile to using a pseudonym on Facebook.

Thomas:

A few real-world scenarios illustrate the point. An employee who is entitled to pull the alarm in the event of a fire is not entitled to pull it for some other purpose, such as to delay a meeting for which he is unprepared. A valet who obtains a car from a restaurant patron is--to borrow the language from §1030(e)(6)--"entitled" to "access [the car]" and "entitled" to "use such access" to park and retrieve it. But he is not "entitled" to "use such access" to joyride. See, e.g., Ind. Code §35-43-4-3 (2020) (felonious criminal conversion to "knowingly or intentionally exer[t] unauthorized control over property of another" if "the property is a motor vehicle"); In re Clayton, 778 N. E. 2d 404, 405 (Ind. 2002) (interpreting this statute to cover misuse of property a person otherwise is entitled to access). And, to take an example closer to this statute, an employee of a car rental company may be "entitled" to "access a computer" showing the GPS location history of a rental car and "use such access" to locate the car if it is reported stolen. But it would be unnatural to say he is "entitled" to "use such access" to stalk his ex-girlfriend.

* * *

The majority's interpretation--that criminality turns on whether there is a single exception to a prohibition--also leads to awkward results. Under its reading, an employee at a credit-card company who is forbidden to obtain the purchasing history of clients violates the Act when he obtains that data about his ex-wife--unless his employer tells him he can obtain and transfer purchase history data when an account has been flagged for possible fraudulent activity. The same is true of the person who, minutes before resigning, deletes every file on a computer. See Royal Truck & Trailer Sales & Serv., Inc. v. Kraft, 974 F. 3d 756, 758 (CA6 2020). So long as an employee could obtain or alter each file in some hypothetical circumstance, he is immune. But the person who plays a round of solitaire is a criminal under the majority's reading if his employer, concerned about distractions, categorically prohibits accessing the "games" folder in Windows.

I guess just to be safe (state law matters), I won't take a chance on bribing a cop.

Thomas should have invoked Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

That this was apparently an officer of the court abusing his powers for profit doesn't factor?

I haven't read the decision, but it seems like it would be pretty dystopian for every violation of a work rule about computer use to be a federal felony.

(Kudos to whoever wanted a test case for finding one where the defendant was a cop.)

I'm hoping the guy got fired.

31 He was charged under a specific federal anti-hacking statute. Whether he also committed a state crime wasn't at issue.

The "hack" was a set up:

This case stems from Van Buren's time as a police sergeant in Georgia. In the course of his duties, Van Buren crossed paths with a man named Andrew Albo. The deputy chief of Van Buren's department considered Albo to be "very volatile" and warned officers in the department to deal with him carefully. Notwithstanding that warning, Van Buren developed a friendly relationship with Albo. Or so Van Buren thought when he went to Albo to ask for a personal loan. Unbeknownst to Van Buren, Albo secretly recorded that request and took it to the local sheriff 's office, where he complained that Van Buren had sought to "shake him down" for cash.

The taped conversation made its way to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which devised an operation to see how far Van Buren would go for money. The steps were straightforward: Albo would ask Van Buren to search the state law enforcement computer database for a license plate purportedly belonging to a woman whom Albo had met at a local strip club. Albo, no stranger to legal troubles, would tell Van Buren that he wanted to ensure that the woman was not in fact an undercover officer. In return for the search, Albo would pay Van Buren around $5,000.

32 I think the opinions demonstrate how hard it is to write a coherent anti-hacking statute.

That's a lot of money. I think I'd assume I was being set up.

36: Very possibly, but what if the statutes focused on getting access illegitimately as opposed to what you did with legitimately accessed data?

35: On the entrapment-to-sting continuum, that seems more on the 'sting' side.

I think it's that they realize that they CAN learn something that seems hard.

I would expect two kinds of later-in-life students; a specially annoying case of gradegrubbers to get a better job, and a gratifying set of people who want to use the subject and know they have to really learn it to do so.

For physics, they're in a box and you don't know which kind they are until a gamma particle is emitted or not.