Do you remember the Berlin Wall coming down? For those students starting college this October the answer to this question could well be "No". Most of them, after all, were only about eight years old at the time. For students of today, events such as the Watergate scandal, the Berlin Wall coming down or the Thatcherite revolution either mean very little, or mean something very different, than they do for their lecturers.

For this reason, Professor Tom McBride of Beloit University, Wisconsin, created "The Mindset List", to help his colleagues relate to students. It's been running for several years, and this year's is the largest compilation to date.

It contains 50 cultural reference-points which lecturers can refer to and is a light-hearted way to help bridge the generation gap. So lecturers need to understand that to kids today, Kurt Cobain's death was "the day the music died"; that they have never had to dress up to go on an airplane journey; and that they feel greater danger from being in school than from the threat of nuclear war.

You can check it out at www.beloit.edu - look for "Mindset List".