In the school newspaper, a student at Connecticut College writes about student laptop use.
[W]e’re creeping toward a point where college life is more about being social and less about being intellectually engaged. The whole point of having a laptop in class should be to expand scholarship and increase efficiency, but I’ve found that they’re having the opposite effect. Strangely enough, classes have become something to be tolerated rather than the reason we’re here.
… All in all, professors seem to be supportive of the laptop trend, but I don’t think they know how widespread the problem is. After all, they can ultimately only see the glowing white apple on the back of their students’ computers. They have no idea what’s on the other side.
Sure they know.
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The writer makes an excellent point when he observes that “classes have become something to be tolerated rather than the reason we’re here.” UD hadn’t thought of that; but yes, the laptop can be seen as the permanent fixture brought into the classroom to positively protect you from an otherwise intolerable experience. It’s not a sometime distraction for when the class now and then becomes dull or makes you drift off a bit; it’s a regular feature of the fifty minutes, a powerful shield that enables you to suffer the insult to your private life which a public classroom represents.
Nothing special about the classroom, though. The laptop shields you from dinners in restaurants with your family; from concerts; from most of social life. When the student writes that “college life is more about being social,” he doesn’t really mean social. He means screen social.
October 19th, 2010 at 7:15AM
Yes, but do let’s remember that for significant numbers of our peers, college was always about being social (albeit not yet screen social, I take the distinction). Back in Northwestern when you and I were there, I felt like a freak for actually taking my classes seriously–people went dutifully, by and large, but their real life was lived in the frat parties and or chatting each other up in the library lounge at 9 p.m. Now even the classroom space has been invaded, I suppose, but the attitude ain’t that different. Oh, there is one difference: the expectation is that people will get As regardless of what they do…
October 19th, 2010 at 7:36AM
Surely there is a positive feedback loop between student behavior and professorial behavior…as more students become academically disengaged, more professors become uninterested in devoting the time to prepare and lecture really well, or for that matter to teach undergraduate courses at all…which in turn makes students on the margin even *less* engaged, and so on…
Also, given that so many students are now in college because they’ve been told they *need* to go…but have no real idea *why* they need to go…there is an analogy between the modern university and a draftee army in peacetime—something that many officers have said they would regard as a very unpleasant sort of thing to have to lead.
October 19th, 2010 at 10:40AM
There was an underclass at NU – the so-called GDIs – who took classes very seriously. They lived in places like Asbury Hall, Hebblethwaite funeral home [sic] and had board jobs. Many of them were outstanding music students.
The fact that chatting up was going on in the library lounge also implies that folks went to the library. Some of them studied until quite late there, too.
I do agree about the As, though.
October 19th, 2010 at 11:15AM
Hey.
Just for the record, I wrote the article for Conn’s College Voice and I’m very much a he and not a she. I assumed John was a sufficiently masculine name to avoid gender confusion.
Anyway, thanks for noticing. Have a nice day.
October 19th, 2010 at 11:24AM
John: Damn. Sorry. Fixing it now.
October 21st, 2010 at 10:48AM
My daughter (13) recently found out what a typewriter is, and that in fact we had one in the basement. Eureka! She’s been doing school assignments on it, very laboriously. I have been pointing out to her how inefficient the thing is relative to a word processor, but she didn’t pay any mind and plowed ahead on the old contraption.
At first I took it to be simply the discovery of something new, even if it was actually something old. And there’s something to that interpretation to be sure. But yesterday, after another round of painstaking edits I was asked to review, I pushed her on the efficiency question again and got a different answer. This time she admitted that when she is on the typewriter she knows she has to do the work. When she is at the computer, there’s the temptation of watching TV on Hulu or listening to music or chatting with pals.
I asked “well, why can’t you be disciplined enough to just do your work on the computer?” She gave me a perfectly logical, indeed appropriate, answeer for a 13-year old: no, dad, I can’t be that disciplined. The typing continues.
October 21st, 2010 at 11:20AM
fenster: Fascinating. Charming! I’ll have to give your anecdote some thought…