In class.
A law professor conducts a study which reveals what we all know: Most students on laptops in class spend most of their time farting around.
“[W]hat causes students to vote with their fingers to ignore us [?]” he asks. He assumes it’s something having to do with us, with professors.
But here’s the thing. Certainly some professors are bores or worse, and students ignore them. Okay. But many professors are reasonably engaging… some are insanely engaging … not as engaging as Joel Osteen (UD‘s in Rehoboth and doing her yearly tv watching) but really quite engaging.
Even less than scintillating, less amiable, professors can, if they’re smart and enthusiastic about their subject, be quite tolerable. I mean, you know, there’s a variety of human personalities out there, and part of the jolt to your system college is supposed to be might include your coming to appreciate the fact that not everyone has to be as chipper as Kathie Lee Gifford to command your attention.
UD, that is, doesn’t think this news about students and laptops and texting should prompt an agonized reappraisal of the way professors do things. She thinks the phenomenon is mainly about the massively online culture which birthed the American college student. College is really the country’s only counter to that culture, being about sustained intellectual focus and real-world verbal interaction.
June 6th, 2011 at 7:57PM
I think there is something magnetically attractive about video screens. If one is around, people find it very, very difficult to look.
A flight instructor told me that when he teaches in new airplanes with large display screens, he has a hard time getting students to focus their attention outside where it belongs, even during final approach.