They're addicts, I know. But when I'm giving them my personal best -- clarity, expertise, years of experience, and visible passion -- and even throwing in new media for spice, yet at least half of them don't even know what universe they're in, so entranced are they by their all-in-one entertainment machines -- well, I have to wonder why I or they bother to be in the room. As sagacious commentators have noted, we proffies can't compete with these omnibus pieces of technological handiwork that offer television, movies, music, pictures, chats, celebrity and sports sites etc. -- literally in the palm of one's hand. Impossible, I think, even if we try to turn our teaching into a circus (which would just debase our profession and student learning).
I honestly feel that I simply can't work properly under these conditions. I can't do my job when, without exaggeration, at least half of my students (maybe even most) make last night's Halloween zombies look like paragons of cognitive acuity. And, yes, their grades reflect their pea-brained attention spans and frequent inability to understand even the simplest notions, no matter how well explained by me, the talking head whose visage and voice I'm sure they wish they could minimize as they would a pesky online pop-up screen.
Do I use an incremental approach, first reminding them of the rules, and then singling out the worst offenders and working my way down the chain if need be? Do I ban the idiot boxes altogether? (Sure way to get snuffed in a nuclear fashion on the class eval.) All I know is that the natural devotion to teaching that I've always had is being extinguished by this relentless march toward the insipid. (I also don't think that getting rid of lectures, putting more courses online etc. is the answer. This problem points not just to a transformation but a degradation of consciousness itself and interpersonal life that bears vast implications.)
Q: Is teaching dead?
To quote Monty Python: "Is it dead?" "Well, it was coughing up blood last night..."
ReplyDeleteI ban all manner of idiot boxes altogether. I announce it clearly during the first day of class that cell phones, laptop computers, and tablet computers are not allowed for any reason. At the end of this first class, invariably some idiot comes to me and whines that they need it to take notes. I say, "I'm sorry, I don't believe it. The last student I saw using a tablet computer to take notes got and F in the class. You'll need to use paper and pencil here." If they whine more, I tell them I'll them them know when this becomes a democracy.
During them rest of the term, if I see a student using any of these electronic doo-dads, I tell them to stop it or leave the classroom. I have to do it nearly every day, but I still do it, if for no other reason to save my dreaded conscience.
Of course, my student evaluations are terrible. I don't care, since I have tenure.
And yes, I agree that this is no less than a degradation of consciousness. It's been written about at book length, in "The Dumbest Generation," by Mark Bauerlein, and "The Shallows," by Nicholas Carr. In 1985, Neil Postman wrote about how television has turned nearly every aspect of life into entertainment in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," and all the new gadgets have made this problem far worse. God help us all.
A possible solution to the Fermi Paradox is that, when ETIs invent electronic entertainment, they lose interest in the real Universe. It reminds me of the Star Trek pilot, The Cage. I sure hope this isn't the solution.
DeleteSame thoughts in my head. Since I had started teaching the theory and practice of idiot box content, I find myself engaged with more and more passive students. I find myself trying to explain the dangers of the Idiot box content, and how it manipulates emotion, alters attention span, limits personal engagement. I get back wishes for more exciting idiot box content. I also find myself less and less interested and able to watch any of this content, which makes it hard for me find enthusiasm to teach it. The more I know, the less I like this stuff.
ReplyDeleteMy students don't want to know more. They want to be entertained.
My approach is similar to Froderick's. I ban cell phones outright, and mark them absent if they are used. They get several freebie absences, but after that their grades take a major hit. I generally only need to make an example of someone once (publicly, of course), and that seems to stop the problem for the rest of the semester. Surprisingly, my evaluations have not suffered in the slightest.
ReplyDeleteMy colleagues think I'm some horrible monster, imposing authoritarian rules on my poor, oppressed students. Whatever. While they all whine about how stupid, needy, and unengaged their students are, I can boast almost no student misery. My students aren't better, but they work harder (because they have to) and hence learn more. They are engaged in class discussion because I give them no choice. They don't bother me with dumb questions over email because they know I will just delete them without responding. Policies aimed at professionalizing the classroom have saved my sanity. I try to proselytize, but then I get the reputation among my colleagues for being the big jerk. Oh well.
Post of the week, surely.
ReplyDeleteAnd....paragons of cognitive acuity.....is excellent
Teaching will go on for ages. Learning? That's done.
ReplyDeleteI follow Frod's plan, except I don't tell them to turn stuff off. I sjust quietly mark them absent. They're so funny, thinking they can get away with playing with their phones without me noticing. So very funny.
ReplyDeleteAt around midterm, I make a general announcement, reminding them that if they are using their phones in class (or doing anything unrelated to class, like sleeping), that they are marked absent for the day, and that some of them are already at the maximum absences as a result. One more and they will fail the class.
When the worst offenders want to know how many absences they have, I tell them. Then I watch the blood drain out of their faces.
Idiots.
Sorry if this is getting old, but I have to disagree.
ReplyDeleteExactly when were the good old days when students didn't drive their teachers crazy?
Oh, there were never days when students didn't drive their teachers crazy. Let's not be hopeless romantics. The problem is that, back in the days when students read newspapers in class, it was easy to spot this and tell the student to stop. They're getting better all the time at concealing texting, although novices at this look like perverts since they're constantly staring intently into their crotch.
DeleteAlso, reading did affect human cognition. Socrates disparaged it, but it by and large gave us capability the human mind didn't have previously. I've seen nothing in any late 20th/early 21st-century technology that does this: calculators, for example, have made it easier to avoid learning math, so our students never do. It turns out that letting machines do our thinking for us doesn't make us smarter: both the Saturn V and the SR-71 were designed with slide rules and t-squares.
P.S. I will concede that computers are indispensable for research in the physical sciences, but are used effectively only by people who understand the principles by which they work thoroughly, unlike nearly all my students.
DeletePhilip, I believe this is a very important comment. I think the age of lecture is dead. These electronics addicts will end up flourishing in online coursework that requires them to unlock new material only when they have sufficiently proven mastery of the old material. We're in for a few decades of transition.
DeleteFor sure, Monkey. The benefits of any new technology will always create new sets of problems and unintended consequences.
DeleteUniversity professors gnashed their teeth and pulled their hair when books first became available to large numbers of people. "Students won't have to memorize anything anymore," they worried. "They'll be able to look things up in books." A couple of thousand years earlier (more or less), Socrates was alarmed by the invention of reading as Froderick FfF pointed out in his comment.
Whether computers will change human cognition (or whether reading ever did) is an open question, but I think it's pretty safe to imagine that for the next few hundred years, however we pass along or exchange information will include written words. They might not be written on paper, but human beings will still be reading and writing.
The problem with declaring the age of the lecture to be dead is that employers will continue to use it, in the form of staff meetings, since it's the easiest way for them to talk to their employees. Employers will therefore continue to criticize university faculty for not preparing our students for life in the real world, this time for failing to train our students in the skill of sitting and attentively listening. This skill is by no means obsolete, no more than the skill of writing intelligible, grammatical prose, of the kind that text-ese greatly undermines.
DeleteLast Summer my whole department agreed that the use of electronic devices would not be permitted in classes and put that in our syllabi. Guess we'll all get bad evals this year. I've given a warning, then I quietly mark them absent after that.
ReplyDeleteI generally teach in computer classrooms, so telling students to put away the computers isn't really an option (though freezing the screens and/or spying on what they're doing -- powers I use very sparingly, but warn them at the beginning of the year exist -- are). My solution is to make my class more and more focused on having students do things that produce (at least lightly graded) end products, and having them communicate the results to each other periodically. It's not a panacea, and it won't work for some subjects (especially those where letting students loose with the materials needed to figure things out on their own, even with direction/supervision, might produce fires, explosions, and/or other serious damage to people and/or property), but I think it's the general direction in which we need to head. The upside: hands-on experience is a proven way to produce actual learning, and working with real people on real stuff might even manage to be more engaging than those #$%! screens. The downside: this highly effective approach to instruction is also very expensive, and one still needs to accomplish background-information-transfer at some point. If one "flips" the classroom and has students do that part at home, they have to discipline themselves to pay more attention to a video or book than to the available screen-based distractions, which is probably even harder than disciplining oneself to pay attention to a real live person present in the same room.
ReplyDeleteTeaching in a computer classroom these days is probably BETTER because at least those screens are big and stationary. It's the small stuff--the tablets, the laptops, and the cell phones--that provide the biggest distractions. And if a computer classroom is set up properly--that is, with all the facing out from the wall so that the teacher can see what everyone is doing--then that's best of all. Unfortunately, I've never actually taught in a classroom set up like that.
DeleteStill, I've never managed to have a discussion in a computer classroom that matched the quality of those in a non-technology classroom.
My favorite computer classrooms have the students arranged along tables that create two facing rows down the middle of the room, perpendicular to the screen and whiteboard. With wheelie chairs, students can easily face me or anyone else in the room (though it's still not an ideal discussion venue). The seats that inevitably exist around the perimeters of such rooms (facing the walls) aren't quite as good, but I still like that setup better than a combination of perimeter seats and tables parallel to the screen/board, which is our other available setup. That positions more people with their backs fully to each other, and/or to me. The "big brother" function allows me to see (and seize) their screens from any position should I so choose, but it always feels a bit too authoritarian to me. They have to understand and successfully apply the concepts at some point; if they don't do it in class, they're going to have to do it at home (or fail and take the class again). I'm into providing well-designed horse troughs and gentle nudges, not trying to coerce drinking.
DeleteAlthough they're illegal--but no one has, to my knowledge, ever been prosecuted, pocket-sized, battery-operated cell phone jamming devices are readily available over the internet. They're less than $40 and effective up to 15 meters.
ReplyDeleteA Christmas stocking stuffer for a proffie close to your heart!
My genuine thanks for all the support and ideas (and to the mods for gracing my jeremiad with the designation, "Big Thirsty for the Ages").
ReplyDeleteNo, Philip, things really are different now (at least in my neck of the woods). I'm not just old and jaded, and it's not just a blip. About five years ago I started noticing the emergence of some unusually bad behaviors. At first I thought they were a blip (ups and downs are normal, of course), but after a while I realized the enduring nature of the changes. These little devices are deceivingly powerful, and are changing significantly, often for the worse, fundamental aspects of human awareness and behavior. When I look out on my sea of digitized subjects, I don't see enlightened, evolved, or more efficient beings. I see frighteningly glazed-over eyes looking for the next new superficial digital high. I've been teaching far too long not to notice the real alterations in the student population. For the same reason, I know that students missing exams left and right, as though dodging doo-doo being flung at them, is a relatively new phenomenon, and hasn't always been the case. My next post!
You might be right about a fundamental change in human beings caused by digital technology. Or you might be wrong. We'll have to wait and see to know for sure.
DeleteI went to college in the 60s, and if something like CM had existed back then, I'm sure we'd find plenty of posts by the people who taught my generation freaking over "the emergence of unusually bad behaviors." "Frighteningly glazed-over eyes looking for the next new superficial . . . high" would have been one of the symptoms of the coming Dark Ages, too.
A reading of Aristotle and a study of how the human being learns tells us that we learn best by imitating a real human being. There is a lot of evidence that it was our physical ability to undertake endurance running that allowed us to develop our minds. Not just the access to the better quality of protein ( yeeehaw! raw buffalo steak!) but the ability to be patient, acquire persistence, and plan ahead provides us this better opportunity.
DeleteTechnology is only an extension of human will. A fork is technology. But not all technology is helpful. If we acquire information in small chunks, acquire quickly but haven't got a sense of the big picture, or how to plan with this information, then it is useless.
I teach the content that people like to say causes mindless behavior and they are right.
If something like CM had existed back in the '60s, I have no question that there would have been lots of posts about the emergence of bad behaviors by the students, because they were so well justified. LSD definitely did cause "frighteningly glazed-over eyes looking for the next new superficial . . . high," and while it's not as common now as it was then, the inebriant mania that started then shows no sign of abating. Something I remember the over-30 generation in the '60s being aghast about was the greatly increased use of "four-letter words," which have resulted in a coarser, meaner society, thanks so much. There were also the at-the-time unprecedented student protests, one by-product of which was anonymous evaluations of faculty by students. It's no wonder academia ever since had been in an age that is getting ever more darker.
Delete"There, there, everything's gonna be all right" is NOT what I'm saying. It could very well be that the Dark Ages began in the 60s or that they're beginning now. I don't happen to think so--simply because this students-today-are-worse-than-they've-ever-been discussion could have taken place at just about any time in human history.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 70s--the 1870s--the Dean of the medical school at Harvard ended written essay exams because students couldn't write well enough. And if you dug through source material, I'll bet that you'll find plenty of complaints about contemporary students' "inebriant mania."
Whatever. Today's students--whether they're droolier than yesterday's--are the cards we've been dealt. Complaining about them helps our sanity. It's also healthy, but not nearly as much fun, to keep our complaints in perspective.
Oh yeah, one of the earliest extant pieces of writing--a shard with cuneiform script dating from 2-3000 BCE (I forget the exact dating) says something like kids today can't write.
This argument isn't convincing when you cite, or rather don't even bother to cite, a culture that became extinct.
DeletePhilip, here's why I don't share your perspective. Yes, I'm tiringly familiar with the old/ancient quotes about how youth are going bad etc. I don't believe there was throughout most of history a Garden of Eden but that we're now experiencing the Fall from Grace. There have been many good (or better) phases and many bad phases throughout history. Until about five years ago, we (in my local/regional culture) were in a relatively good phase (even if not so hot compared to other times). Quite simply, I can see a world of difference between the first twenty years of my teaching experiences and the last five years of my teaching experiences. The fault line is pretty clear, even if it's not absolute. And, again, I'm sure it's not just me. Indeed, it took me a while to come confidently to the conclusion that the apparent changes were real, structural changes. And though technological "progress" isn't the only influence, it's surely a substantial factor in the new normal.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Old School. Our perspectives are different because we work in different places and because our evidence is entirely anecdotal. But here's some possible anecdotal evidence that I'd find more convincing: I wonder what professors at elite, exclusive STEM schools like Cal Tech or MIT would have to say about today's students? Those students are almost certainly as "digitized" as any other group of college students. If their teachers see a real "fault line" beginning about five years ago, then I would be worried, indeed.
ReplyDeleteFroderick FfF, the cuneiform script business is just an example of how the older generation has always complained about youngsters. I don't understand why the culture (Etruscan, if I remember right)is extinct makes much difference.
I've been trying to come up with the source of this example. I can see the cover of The Atlantic or Harper's in my mind's eye, but so far, I can't cite the article I found this lovely tidbit in. Until I can, I won't use it again.