It emboldened me. I kept going, getting really revved up. The student nodded some more.
Shit, I'm good, I thought.
Then when we stopped to take a quiz, the student was still nodding. I saw the tell tale ear bud cord going to her ears, however.
When the quiz ended and I started lecturing on our next assignment, the student was still nodding along to her own personal soundtrack (mine would be Alice Cooper, but that's neither here nor there).
I couldn't take it anymore. "Charlene, are you listening to music," I said.
"Huh," was her reply - not too surprisingly.
"Are you playing your iPod right now while I'm talking?"
"Yes," she said. "Music relaxes me."
"Me, too, Charlene, but I actually find I have to be a bit more focused to make class worth anything."
"Well, there's nothing in the syllabus," she said. "And I need it because my guidance counselor in high school said I prolly had ADD."
"Well, I want you to listen to me when I'm talking about class."
"That's okay, I'll take one ear out," she said, pulling one of the cords.
"Okay," I said, "then I'll be sure you get half a grade."
I didn't see what happened after that; I put my attention to the rest of class and Charlene didn't stick around afterwards to school me further.
Hooray, a new entry in my syllabus!
If it's a lecture class, students are free to go to hell in their own ways.
ReplyDeleteIf it's a participation class, she fails.
If you teach "Socratically," make sure that everyone has noticed you calling her out for not paying attention, then pop her a question on the order of "what color is the sky on a sunny day?"
Already got this one in the syllabus and still have students who do this. They're flunking all on their own at this point. I pointed out once that they had missed instructions and, in one case, completely missed the topic for their next paper, but they keep thinking they have special multi-tasking brains. Usually, I get this request during the final exam when they want to blast music into their brains.
ReplyDeleteSome of the more "progressive" teachers (or EdDs) in the netosphere have made the suggestion that we should get rid of syllabus-as-contract idea, it's a flexible, open document subject to revision and student input, etc etc. If students are going to treat it like a contract - if they're going to use it as an excuse to do whatever we didn't explicitly tell them not to do - then by god I'm going to treat it like a contract too, and make that fucker as airtight as possible.
ReplyDeleteOn the other end of the spectrum, I started a new adjunct gig at a second college this semester, and their required syllabus format included at least thirteen pages (THIRTEEN PAGES!) of bureacratic nonsense. THIRTEEN SINGLE-SPACED PAGES!
I deleted the nonsense and gave my students the short version, then turned in the long version to the chair. None of the students will suffer for it.
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ReplyDeleteI like to put "Do not do anything to harm, disrespect, or annoy me or others in the class" as a caveat for everything else I haven't got in my syllabus.
ReplyDeleteFor me, THIS is the real College Misery for me, too, this generation of completely fucking clueless students, so in it for their own pleasure and enjoyment that we're just obtrusive speed bumps along the way in the great movie of their lives.
ReplyDeleteI fucking hate them today, because I've had a kid say that prolly line to me, too. "My mom says I'm prolly gifted, so I need more help."
A student whose mother is telling them that is going to need help. No "prolly" about it!
DeleteWait, "I'm prolly gifted, so I need more help."
DeleteWTF? The accepted meaning of "gifted" is "I find the standard material so easy that I'm bored to tears." Ergo, no need for "more help."
FYI: in one of the texts I was perusing from the Ed Dept., I saw that the chapter on "Gifted Children" also included "Disabled Children." It was entitled "Exceptional Learners in the Classroom" and proceeded to lump those with developmental delays in with those who are so smart they should skip elementary school.
Delete"we're just obtrusive speed bumps along the way in the great movie of their lives."
DeleteWell yeah you kinda are. In the past 4 years I maybe remember 10% of my classes content-wise. The rest of the time I spent learning to tolerate getting raped by midterms, pulling all nighters, and surviving by the seam of my pants. College does teach something...just not what high schoolers imagine it does.
There's an entire journal called, IIRC, The Journal of Exceptional Children. Of the various volumes I perused, almost every article of every issue of every year dealt with disabled/retarded/autistic kids. One article, if that, per year discussed gifted children. That's grounds for a big ol' WTF.
DeleteThat being said, there's some crossover between gifted and disabled. A friend who was in a gifted-and-talented program during middle school/junior high described her classmates as...well, "teched in the head" is probably the nicest way to say it. For example, there was the boy who continually gnawed at the warts on his arm, the boy who was incapable of looking anyone in the eye, the boy who was convinced that if he stood atop a chair and flapped his arms hard enough, he'd fly, and the various boys who still wore diapers.
Even so, these examples don't mean that all gifted kids are socially maladroit weirdos. Sometimes it means that kids are just plain smart, and lumping smart kids in with ones who have developmental delays is stigmatizing at best, and at worst, it's just plain wrong, wrong, wrong.
The Journal of Exceptional Children
DeleteApologies to parents of children with various cognitive disabilities, but wow. Way to go for the literal meaning and subvert the standard connotation.
Of course, we knew that education types tend to prefer to ignore the fact that gifted children aren't going to take care of themselves.
When in elementary school I was in the "gifted program," which in the bureaucracy of the day was a part of "alternative education." When grade 8 graduation time came, this meant we graduated with the other "alternative education" kids e.g. the developmental delayed. What was a very illuminating experience was how we, the kids, didn't give 2 shits, but the "gifted parents" (who were nearly all profs and MDs at the next-door med school uni) all threw an absolute fit when they arrived at the auditorium and realized who we were graduating with ["I don't want my kid graduating with "them"!" etc etc]. On that day, it was the students who were the grownups, and the parents who were the children.
Delete