Who Cares More (Freshman Edition)
Does Immanuel need to have a Current Events class? The reason I bring this up is in response to a few extra credit questions I asked the Freshmen on their vocabulary quiz recently. These were the two questions:
Who is the new Vice-President of the United States?
What two teams are in this year’s Super Bowl?
In a class of 30, only 40% were able to answer the first question correctly. Only 43% answered the second question right. This surprised me a little bit. With so much talk about the election this year, I thought this information would have been absorbed somewhere along the way, even by someone with very little interest in politics. Since most of our students have some interest in the success of the Packers, I thought that they would at least get one of the teams headed to the Super Bowl correct. As far as I know, Krause is the only Patriots fan in this zip code.
I decided to see if gender made a difference. There was a rather striking contrast. Fifty percent of males knew the new VP compared to only 29% of the females. Less surprising was that 63% of the males knew the Super Bowl teams compared to 21% of the females. It was probably too small of a sample to conclude that guys care more about politics and football than do girls. (It would seem, however, that the girls cared more about their vocabulary quiz score.)
The final comparison dealt with townies compared to dormies. Fifty-four percent of townies got the VP right compared to 29% of dormies. Dormies, however, knew the Super Bowl teams at a higher percentage, 47% to 38%. Perhaps a future article will deal with theories to explain these numbers.