Via Instapundit, an interesting report from Inside HigherEd that talks about an environment that every student is familiar with.
Some professors threaten to confiscate students’ cell phones if they go off during class. Laurence Thomas has his own approach to classroom distractions. If the philosopher at Syracuse University catches a student sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class, he’ll end the class on the spot and walk out. It doesn’t matter if there is but one texter in a large lecture of hundreds of students. If you text, he will leave.
Last week, when a student in a large lecture — in the front row no less — sent a text message, Thomas followed through on his threat (as he had done just a few days earlier). And he then sent the university’s chancellor, his dean, and all of the students an e-mail message explaining his actions and his frustration at the “brazen” disrespect he had received in class. In the e-mail, he noted that the student who sent the text message is Cuban, and that last year, two Latino students had started to play tic-tac-toe during his class.
Now, I have voluntarily relocated in a class to get away from incessant text-messaging, so I can understand the professor’s perspective. But, as the article goes on to point out, text-messaging is today’s version of note-passing; students today live in a persistent, ubiquitous information environment where instant communication with other parties is the rule rather than the exception.
In a time when e-mail is snail-mail, where land-line telephony does not exist, and where the “dead-tree” media doesn’t have so much as a toe-hold in the media market share game, perhaps it’s time for the professors to quit taking such offence at what is essentially now human nature.
Venor Vinge has an eve-of-the-Singularity scene like this set in a future classroom, where students have adapted wearable technology (contacts and corneal implants with HUD capabilities, constantly wired to the Web), giving them what amounts to virtual telepathy, and the teacher has to keep them on topic and honest. Very interesting idea.
As for human nature… granted. But I’ve found that if you want to keep a bunch of people’s attention, it helps if you take what you’ve got to say seriously, which also means demanding that they take it seriously too — on pain of humiliation, if necessary. These profs take it too far, but I’ve stopped silent and waited until people who were talking while I was talking wake up and realize the whole room is staring at them.
Tends to work.
In response to your comment, and thanks, by the way, for stopping by, I have seen a professor demand silence from the class. And he got it for the rest of the semester after just one incident. But the vast majority of the professors seem to take a very laissez-faire attitude; as long as the entire class is not disturbed, anything goes. In some classes, students are almost continuously getting up, leaving the room, coming back in, etc. That is more disturbing to me than some guy setting up his next basketball game via text-message. It’s almost as if they are afraid to demand respect, attention, and a modicum of self-discipline from the students, who are, by their very nature, testing the limits to every new thing they encounter. By indulging them, the profs perpetuate the behavior, and likely encourage further testing of unknown limits. I like your approach, have seen it work, but…..
After researching other blogs on texting and doing more research on texting in class, I came up with an alternative on my blog lifewithmycomptuer.com – to help work digital messaging successfully into the classroom. Of course it will not stop those who would text for socialization only, but it might offer students another way to communicate in class that they enjoy, for example listening to podcasts for music, in education to hear lectures and course updates. As a professor I tried demanding no cell phones and most of the time was successful, then I became fascinated with the idea of using text messaging in the classroom. Not to mention less frustration for the professors and teachers.