… but another solid contribution to UD‘s library of student laments about worthless wired classrooms.

Why aren’t professors and administrators reading the same material, and doing something about it? UD, for instance, would love to read a professor’s description of what it’s like to teach hundreds of people totally ignoring you.

In lecture a few weeks ago, I observed a guy sitting in the row in front of me watching three-fourths of the movie [I’d drop ‘three-fourths of the movie’] “Twilight.” Two seats down from him, two people were going through Google images of Beyoncé. I turned to note this to my neighbor, who nodded while scrolling through her BlackBerry.  [Nice touch – Even the neighbor’s wired.]

These people weren’t anomalies. Though the lecture, delivered by a professor ranked 4.3 in the CUE Guide, was a fairly interesting one, a good portion of the class looked up from their various screens only when a phrase was prefaced with the warning, “This might be on the midterm.”  [Nice conclusion to sentence, but drop the many modifiers: fairly, good, various.]   It looked like in this class, at least in this lecture, intellectualism was dead. [Just make the sentence ‘Intellectualism was dead.’  See how, as is often the case, SOS is largely making your writing snappier by editing out verbiage?]  But I don’t blame the people—I blame the technology.

The introduction of laptops and wireless Internet into the classroom environment has allowed us to prioritize our time in a highly pragmatic way.  [Fuck prioritize.  Ugly bogus word.  Corporate jargon.  Save it for your career as a motivational speaker.  And drop ‘highly.‘]

No longer are the choices in class between doodling in a notebook and paying attention; now we have an entire workstation at our fingertips. We can e-mail, organize, and update away while a professor is explaining easy or boring material that presumably doesn’t warrant full attention. [This responds to cynical laptop-defending professors who insist that using a laptop during class is just another form of doodling.  No it ain’t.]

The problem is that while many initiate these side tasks with the intention of only drifting away from class for a short period of time, we often don’t have that self-control. [Drop often and only.] More and more of our attention is taken up by reading blogs or clicking through Wikipedia, until we’ve de-prioritized listening to everything but the most essential concepts. [De-prioritized!  I’m pukingized.]

This approach may allow for the best economization of time  [Oy.  What are we, a business major?  This is basically a nice, conversational essay, but the writer needs to deal with her ize problem.]—it’s probably possible to fill in gaps in the syllabus during reading period, and those emails need to be sent for tomorrow. However, taking on this cost-benefit view of class time both diminishes enjoyment of the course and contributes to a cycle of indifference under which class quality suffers.

When a successful class is defined by acquiring the minimum amount of necessary information in the minimum amount of time, then something is off. Lectures should be interesting, not just useful for the midterm, and when we budget our class time we give up on this basic intellectual ideal. The nuances that get cut with an economic approach to class time are what make the Harvard academic experience more than four years of test prep. When we drop them, we drop learning for its own sake, that clichéed goal that we laud but clearly do not internalize as we fail the simple laptop-lecture attention test.  [Again, this writing could use some sex appeal, but it’s okay.]

Furthermore, class quality on the whole suffers from individual indifference. After all, if we don’t pay attention to anything but vital concepts, why should professors attempt to engage us anymore?   [Crucial point.  Well said.]  Why should they add details or throw in a joke when we’re not looking to be interested? [The whole throw in a joke thing is important too.  Since the laptops, er, dehumanize the classroom, the professor will understandably decide that there’s no point in bothering to have a personality for the purpose of teaching.  If students want her to be another screen, fine.]  Surely, the prospect of lecturing to 200 metallic screens is a discomfiting one, and even more so when they know that an awkward non-response to a question in lecture means that 200 people are logged onto gchat. [I love the phrase ‘lecturing to 200 metallic screens’.  The word metallic is wonderful.]

The best antidote to the rise of viral activity during class time would be to pull the plug on wireless internet in classes in which it is not academically necessary. [Instead of that lame final phrase, just write ‘pull the plug on most wireless internet in class’.] This would inevitably upset many students. However, such a reaction [Students would be upset, but this would only...]  would only prove the degree to which zoning out in class thanks to technology is ingrained in the way we spend our class time  [Drop ‘in the way we spend our class time’.]. Such paternalism may not be the answer, but certainly something has to change. After all, the lecture hall is beginning to resemble Lamont Cafe, without the lattes.  [Drop ‘After all’.]

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Bonus extra: The old days at Harvard. James Agee describes one of his English professors:

It’s perfectly impossible for me to define anything about him or about what he taught but it was a matter of getting frequent and infinite vistas of perfection in beauty, strength, symmetry, greatness—and the reasons for them, in poetry and in living….That sounds extravagant—well, his power over people was extravagant, and almost unlimited. Everyone who knew him was left in a clear, tingling daze, at the beginning of the summer.