I'm pretty curious, but I wonder whether I would have come across that way that my college professors. I felt like college stifled my curiosity. Undergraduate courses rarely care about original or creative work, or about students pursuing their individual interests. They more or less want students to learn what the authorities in the field think.
I did student representation while I was at college, so I had quite a bit of contact with teaching staff around discussing the learning process. There were a lot of complaints from their side that students weren't engaging with the course and were rote learning answers for exams.
My perspective was that most of the courses were badly taught (students were given little guidance and struggled to learn the basics) AND badly examined (you had to guess at what the professor wanted in order to score well - it wasn't actually assessing learning accurately). The courses where you found truly curious students were the ones that taught the basics in a way that other professors would consider hand holding (which meant they could get passed that onto more advanced material), and gave clear advice on what was expected in and how to approach the exam (so that students didn't have to worry about that and could focus on learning and their interests).
You'll always get some students who just aren't interested (perhaps they picked the wrong course, or simply aren't that academic), but you'll also find that the same students respond dramatically differently to different environments.
I did student representation while I was at college, so I had quite a bit of contact with teaching staff around discussing the learning process. There were a lot of complaints from their side that students weren't engaging with the course and were rote learning answers for exams.
My perspective was that most of the courses were badly taught (students were given little guidance and struggled to learn the basics) AND badly examined (you had to guess at what the professor wanted in order to score well - it wasn't actually assessing learning accurately). The courses where you found truly curious students were the ones that taught the basics in a way that other professors would consider hand holding (which meant they could get passed that onto more advanced material), and gave clear advice on what was expected in and how to approach the exam (so that students didn't have to worry about that and could focus on learning and their interests).
You'll always get some students who just aren't interested (perhaps they picked the wrong course, or simply aren't that academic), but you'll also find that the same students respond dramatically differently to different environments.