A professor at the University of South Carolina responds to an argument often made by fans of laptops in the classroom.
“Some say that if you’re not more interesting than Facebook, then you have no business teaching, but that’s not quite fair,” [one professor] said. “Facebook is seductive, and it’s hard to compete with that. We all love to be entertained, but I don’t think that’s what education is. I can’t teach you anything if you’re sitting there saying, ‘Teach me; I dare you.'”
October 13th, 2010 at 10:53AM
“Teach me; I dare you” is a very good way of summing up the “I must be entertained at all times” students. It’s frustrating, too, because if I were as attention-grabbing as Lady Gaga, well, I’d be earning Gaga-scale wages, and not working in academe.
I do my best to be interesting and engaging, and teach what they need to know. But I don’t like having to try to compete with ESPN online or Facebook or Twitter or whatever the hell is out there.