Finding The Right Mindset Before Talking To Twentysomethings

Remember, They Know De Niro, But Only As Greg Focker

Every year before the start of the fall semester, the faculty at Beloit College in Wisconsin is presented with what has become known as the "Mindset List."

The popular lit's intent is to help professors avoid using cultural references that will be lost on members of the incoming freshman class.

Call a South American country a banana republic in Geography 101, and students are apt to wonder what a store that sells cool clothing has to do with international politics.

No matter how hard adults try to remain aware of pop culture, it is extremely difficult to keep up with, and fully appreciate, how quickly things now change and how different a young person's world view is shaped.

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I mean, I thought I was pretty culturally hip (a word that demonstrates how un-hip I was) when I sent my daughter off to college in 2003. Yet, until I reviewed the Mindset List for that year, it had never dawned on me that to her an egg frying in a pan had nothing to do with food and everything to do with your brain.

While the purpose of the Mindset List is rooted in education, an unintended effect has been to make everyone who views the list question whether "time is on your side" (an ancient reference Boom readers are expected to get).

Here are a few cultural factoids from the Mindset List for the class of 2016.


>>They can't picture people actually carrying luggage through airports rather than rolling it.


>>Women have always piloted war planes and space shuttles.

>>White House security has never felt it necessary to wear rubber gloves when gay groups have visited.

>>They know many established film stars by their voices on computer-animated blockbusters.

>>History has always had its own channel.

>>TheTwilight Zone involves vampires, not Rod Serling.

>>Point-and-shoot cameras are soooooo last millennium.

>>Two-thirds of the independent bookstores in the United States have closed for good during their lifetimes.

