The other half? Students with laptops.

“[W]hen you start reading your slides,” a University of South Dakota student writes to his professors in the school’s newspaper, “I’m picking my FarmVille crops.”

The student’s mainly complaining about mandatory attendance policies. He reasonably enough points out the absurdity of insisting that students attend morgue-like events — especially when everything coming from the crypt is already downloadable.

I don’t know which is more offensive: Being forced to listen to a person with a PhD read PowerPoint slides for an hour when I could have done it in 20 minutes at home or the fact that if I don’t go then I will be dropped from the course and thus robbed of a few hundred dollars.

How does a person with a PhD think reading PowerPoint slides is an effective teaching method? At least have the decency to not drop me if I don’t show up.

PowerPoint: I had not thought death had undone so many.

Because we are all drawn into the world of the Internet, someone needs to step in and break that distraction. That responsibility falls on the shoulders of Saint Joseph’s University and its faculty. Many of my professors do not allow laptops and make that clear in the syllabus, but many others allow students free rein. These professors that allow laptops, however, often scold people for being on their cellphones. Why? Because they’re distracting. Then why not ban the laptop, a device that not only distracts the user, but also those around them?

More and more, American university students are forced to point out the obvious to their professors. Stop doing this.

It’s pretty unseemly – students having to tell their professors how to be responsible.

And responsible professors have, for the most part, stopped it.

What’s mainly left are the proprietors of what UD calls the morgue classroom, professors who keen over a PowerPoint while their students nod off to Netflix.

Everybody all tucked in and ready for bed.

What a shocker!

This is around the twentieth study to yield results like these.

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The real question now is: Why will most professors – assuming they bother to find out these results – not get rid of laptops?

And the answer is easy: Most of them are afraid to. No telling how students will respond.

And the rest of the professors? Laptops make their teaching lives ever so much easier. Life is beautiful when no one’s listening. Many such teachers compound the loveliness by using PowerPoint throughout the class, thus creating what UD calls The Morgue Classroom. They just need to stand there reading words out loud while students watch football games. A nice quiet workable twice weekly experience.

Ban laptop use in our classrooms, the Brown University editorial board tells the leadership of that school. Don’t pander to us anymore; laptops are creating morgue classrooms. Make us get rid of them.

Other universities have shut off the wireless connection in lecture halls so that students cannot log on to the Internet while in class. This is not an attack [on] technology but rather a modification tactic to improve the dynamic of the student-professor relationship in class. Brown is not immune to these problems and should take action to promote more constructive classroom environments.

A rather disgusting situation, no? Even though all universities are aware that research overwhelmingly demonstrates the astounding damage laptops in classrooms do, most universities cynically and lazily keep to them. This forces the victims of laptops – students themselves – to beg universities to do something about the situation.

Ah, the morgue classroom. This Brandeis student is experiencing, in “four out of the five classes that I am taking this semester,” what UD calls the morgue classroom, where the professor gazes earthward and intones, while the students gaze at their laptops and drift off.

The morgue classroom is as silent as the grave – more silent each class session, since, as this student goes on to note, there’s no reason to attend.

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Yes, those who attend the dying body, that drifting keening Greek chorus, become fewer and fewer, ultimately stranding the designated mourner at the front of the congregation, humiliated by her aloneness.

Of course you know – don’t you? – that most morgue classrooms feature mandatory attendance policies. How else can you keep them gathering, again and again, at the dark silent river?

Shall we gather at the river?

Give me one good reason.

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You’ll flunk the course if you don’t.

Students – like this one at the University of Maryland – know it. But many can’t stop playing screen games, even in class, so they won’t back a ban.

“Why,” asks this same student, “do professors take this lackadaisical approach when they can ban laptops and get rid of such high levels of distraction altogether?”

Because many professors like what UD has called The Morgue Classroom [scroll down]. A night of the living dead classroom — lights set low, silent students enrapt before screens, professors intoning PowerPoints — this is, let us admit, a beautiful thing, a mystical thing, a floating atmosphere that frees the dreaming mind to roam…

Emily Fish, who calls for the ban, is a freshman at College Park, and, as such, still educable. She can still be brought to feel the dark pull of the new classroom. But there’s undoubtedly a learning curve. Many of the changes occurring in twenty-first century classrooms need to be clarified to students. Think here of the problems Murray Siskind, in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, had with the students in his seminar celebrating the car crash.

“[My students think these more and more massive car crashes in movies] mark the suicide wish of technology. The drive to suicide, the hurtling rush to suicide.”

“What do you say to them?”

“These are mainly B-movies, TV movies, rural drive-in movies. I tell my students not to look for apocalypse in such places. I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old ‘can-do’ spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges. A director says, ‘I need this flatbed truck to do a midair double somersault that produces an orange ball of fire with a thirty-six-foot diameter, which the cinematographer will use to light the scene.’ I tell my students if they want to bring technology into it, they have to take this into account, this tendency toward grandiose deeds, toward pursuing a dream.”

“A dream? How do your students reply?”

“Just the way you did. ‘A dream?’ All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?”

“What about it?” I said.

“I tell them it’s not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It’s a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naivete. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities. My students say, ‘Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs. What kind of innocence is this?'”

“What do you say to that?”

“I tell them they can’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach.”

“Look past the violence.”

“Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

The Morgue Classroom breaks away from complication to make the classroom a chapel of private fantasies – sex fantasies, sports fantasies, gun fantasies, crash fantasies, whatever you seek from the screen.

Perhaps eventually the Morgue Classroom will shake itself awake and morph into something like a circle jerk. But that’s probably not for a few more years.

I quoted this in a post a long time ago, and its source – Truman State University’s newspaper – no longer has it online.

I’ve always been moved – angered – by what that student found it necessary to plead. Her Teach us something! haunts me. It’s so easy to put away the PowerPoints and the laptops and smartphones and the rest of the other barrier technologies and just turn the lights back on and look at people and talk to them. Assuming you have something to say beyond a verbal data dump. The PowerPointed plus laptopped classroom is what UD has long called, on this blog, The Morgue Classroom, where everyone ‘s dead – instructor and students.

We can expect more outbursts like this one in our secondary schools and colleges – more Teach Us Somethings – as teachers and professors continue their dance with death in the classroom. The outburst has gone way viral; Jeff Bliss’s statement (“They need to learn face to face.”) is getting national and international attention.

It’s icing on the cake that this happened in Texas, one of our most ignorant states. What are they up to in Texas high schools that’s making the news? A one million dollar football scoreboard.

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(UD thanks JND and UD‘s sister.).

Maybe I hate the word; maybe I don’t. I don’t know yet. I know it doesn’t exist (no results in Google) so it’s all mine; I made it up.

Maybe it’s no different from Lobstermato. In Woody Allen’s essay, “Conversations with Helmholtz,” a man interviewing Helmholtz (a psychoanalyst) says that

I explained to Dr. Helmholtz that I could not order the Lobstermato (a tomato stuffed with lobster) in a certain restaurant. He agreed it was a particularly asinine word and wished he could scratch the face of the man who conceived it.

Blogs are written in real time. When I find techtimonial asinine enough I’ll delete the post.

Meanwhile, here’s part of a techtimonial from a former tech enthusiast – a political science professor at Queen’s University.

[My classroom] technologies were slowly teaching me how to un-teach, and they were teaching my students how to un-learn.

Aside from their distractive potential in the classroom, my students had become passive and expectant of pre-formulaic lectures.

Devices had become a barrier between teacher and student — rather than the revolutionary learning tools that everyone was claiming them to be.

Perhaps what irked me the most is that I’m now convinced that many university administrators have promoted the use of teaching technologies not because it enhances the quality of university education, but because of its potential to service vast numbers of paying students with fewer and fewer expensive faculty members.

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When presented with a visual display during lectures, students become passive. Most simply sit and wait for the next slide, taking their cues as to what is important from the slides and images presented. When I first banned laptops, panic set in. Students claimed that I spoke too fast and that they couldn’t write fast enough. When asked what they were writing down, to my horror the response was ‘everything’.

… Not only has a dependence upon technical devices caused students to disengage, professors are equally at fault for losing their skills to inspire, engage and mentor.

Often, their lectures conform to pre-formulated presentations that are nothing short of a series of bullets.

Many once skilled lecturers have slowly lost their ability to speak with personality, passion and throw ideas around in impromptu ways that leave heads buzzing with ideas for hours afterwards.

It’s what UD calls the morgue classroom.

… the morgue classroom. This is a classroom headed by a professor reading PowerPoint slides aloud and students playing on their phones and laptops. It is Death Perfected. It is the postmodern university interaction par excellence. Read and learn:

Walking by a classroom one day I saw a student sitting in the back row of the room, simultaneously wearing iPod ear buds and texting on her iPhone — which was sitting on top of and thus “hidden” by her Macbook (with the browser opened to her Facebook page)…

… I looked for the professor — and, yes, there he was, standing at the front of the room progressing a Powerpoint slide presentation with lots of bullets followed by perhaps three or four words. And he would use the laser pointer to indicate the specific word(s) he was reading aloud (which was odd, since presumably each of the students was technically literate) and he would then move on to the next slide. Tenured around the time of the Crimean War, he had definitely seen his share of students come through the university. But still, I wondered: Don’t you know? Don’t you care? Aren’t you, in theory, supposed to be teaching them — instead of just playing with your techno-toys while they parallel play with their own?

A Lehigh professor describes the death chamber to a T.

The professor only talked about things on the PowerPoint, and after class he posted the PowerPoints on Blackboard.

After we figured that out, no one took notes.

We didn’t have a single homework assignment due in the class. We only had six papers, and in all of those papers, we were allowed to use the PowerPoints as sources. So each day, I showed up physically, but not mentally, ultimately wasting both my own time and the professor’s. And I still received an A in the class… If you’re worried about students not showing up, it’s time to up your game.

This University of Nebraska student notes the latest trend in the morgue classroom: Mandatory attendance policies. No one wants to be in a morgue, so no one shows up. The coroner, glancing up from his slides, takes umbrage: I will not be left alone in the dark! To stand here in blackness listening to the sound of my own voice reading a textbook – it is too terrible! So he forces the students to sit – formaldehyded row after row – or they flunk the course.

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Really – if you don’t make the morgue mandatory, no one will show up. A student at the University of Texas Arlington thinks his psych and algebra classes have around fifty students in them, but

it’s hard to tell when no one comes.

… Attendance isn’t mandatory, and my instructor posts all of the PowerPoint presentations to Blackboard. So rather than have a PowerPoint read to me, which I can find online, I’d much rather meet with my Freshman Leaders on Campus group or get some actual work done.

My math class runs on a similar dynamic.

Is dynamic quite the word?

… banning laptops. I link to it only because I link to all of these things.

Oh, wait. There is one wonderful moment in it. A comment from a student explaining one instance of laptop use:

I went through a history class that was just every single day death by PowerPoint. And it just, it was awful.

It’s technology v. technology: An asshole in front of the room is too lazy to teach and students are too afraid or indifferent to protest. So students find their own defensive technology in response to the situation.

The result is what UD has called the Morgue Classroom, or TPD: Total Pedagogical Death.

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By the way, some American university students have formally protested excessive or inept faculty PowerPoint use at a number of campuses.

Allowing laptops, as UD often says, is academic malpractice.

Professors who continue to allow laptop use fall into the following categories.

1. I could give a shit. It’s easier for me to do virtually nothing up there if students are sedated with their fun screens. To make matters perfect, I use old text-heavy PowerPoints and drone and dribble over them. Eventually my teaching will resemble my deep calm when sleeping off benders, and my classroom will be a morgue.

2. I hate and fear humanity, especially students. I look forward to the day when all of them will be hidden from me behind their screens.

That’s about it.