He came home after one of his university orientation talks to second-year high school students and let loose on X (formerly Twitter) like he had never done before. “Some things will get into life that will freak you out,” wrote the anthropologist from the Rovira I Virgili University, Alba Medina, when referring to the schoolchildren present in her last class.
That day, she admits, she was “annoyed and disgusted” because her college orientation class had gone terribly. But that session was only the straw that broke the camel's back of the helplessness accumulated in the resume of this anthropologist, who in her latest talks notes a greater disinterest among those students who are one step away from university. This year, she has the perception that “the apathy, apathy and disinterest” of these students has increased. A reality, Alba Medina warns, “very serious.”
The hot reflections of this counselor, which have gone viral, invite, at the very least, to reflection. “Other years I didn't encounter people so apathetic or so rude; "There was the typical funny guy and that's it, but this year there are many groups that don't attend," he repeats to La Vanguardia just as he had already told Jordi Basté yesterday morning, in El món a RAC1.
“Teenagers who are incapable of maintaining attention for 30 minutes straight, who talk and laugh, boycotting the talk and showing zero respect for me and the university student who accompanies me to tell them things that should interest them in the second year of high school,” he wrote in your X account.
Medina wants to make it clear, given the impact of his words on the Internet, that at no time is he generalizing. “Of course there are dedicated groups!” she exclaims. But that balance is tipping too far to one side. At least in their talks, where insults and impertinences begin to win over the reflections and questions that would be expected among these students.
Alba Medina is active on social media, where she shares many of her reflections. And she is going to continue along that line, because although she admits that in this case she may have exposed her feelings too much and it is not always good to write in “hot” terms, she is convinced that the debate generated by the words of she “is positive.”
This anthropologist, in love with her work as a university counselor, has not been as surprised by the fact that her reflections have gone viral "as by the large number of messages from teachers who congratulate me and say that it was time for someone to tell all this." ”. It is still paradoxical, for Medina, that those teachers who live daily those unpleasant situations that she suffers only in some of her talks, remain so silent.
This Rovira i Virgili counselor strives to make it clear, no matter how discouraged she may come home, when things don't go well, that she plans to continue giving her all in her talks. Only she knows how gratifying it is to see that “my advice can guide, help or guide the decision of a second-year high school student who is not yet clear about what future she wants.” That, even if it is only in one case, is already for Alba Medina “the best of rewards.”
The anthropologist – she repeats that her intention is not to dramatize or generalize – only intends with these reflections to set future guidelines on how to focus or program a student's jump to university to help that student. She believes, from experience, that things are not going in the right direction.
And he gives examples of the two extremes he struggles with in those classrooms. “We go from the dedicated medical student, hysterical about the PAU tests (university entrance exams), to the schoolboy who responds with great apathy when asked what interests him most or where he sees himself working, that the only thing he cares about in this life is making money.”
And it is at that point, when referring to the last answer, where this anthropologist opens another educational thunder box. Alba Medina wonders what students who already know are not going to go to university do in those second-year high school classes, either because they will never get the cut-off grade or simply because they have already decided that they are going to do something else.
A panorama in which it is very difficult to awaken the interest of a university counselor, because for those students what someone who comes from that world can tell them, they don't give a damn.
Alba Media wonders if “those parents who force their children to complete Baccalaureate, when they could be doing other training cycles that interest them more” are not also very to blame for this apathy or lack of perspectives.
Another debate, without a doubt, in which this university counselor points out, “the bad reputation that Vocational Training continues to have for some.” This is something that this anthropologist, who was already baptized yesterday as “the one on Twitter” in her last talk this week, does not quite understand.
