Tuesday, March 3, 2015


20 comments:

  1. This is easy, Jesse. Laptops are not allowed. Pencils are, but not up the nose.

    Next!

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    1. No, that can't be right. You're supposed to see the problem through the Gumdrop Unicorn lens and reach the same conclusion about the One True Way to run a classroom, despite all research that concluded otherwise.

      In Gumdrop Unicorn Land, laptop computers are allowed in class, but pencils are banned, because they're too sharp, as are pens, because the ink stains. Students who don't take tests need nothing more than a box of crayons to write with. Chalk was tried, but too many of the kids were eating it.

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    2. Hmm. The policy is going to need some rethinking. Help me with these juice boxes, will you? Nap time is almost over and it's almost time for another round of pushing random buttons on the laptop while pretending to look at the front of the classroom.

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  2. Such as drawing a funny beard and glasses as in the helpful example to the left of the tweet?

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  3. Wow! That guy is a spectacularly pompous gift that just keeps giving!

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  4. I'm late to the kerfuffle, but stop it, this can't be real. On Twitter he calls himself a "rogue educator" and "advocate for pedagogy!?" HA HA HA HA HA ha ha ha....gasp....snort...... This is performance art, right? He writes for "Portlandia," right?
    I can't even....I. Can't. Even.

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    1. Hmmmm… Leaving aside the growing mountain of research that shows that laptops impede participation (something he says he loves) and learning, a laptop is not a pencil. Actually, let me propose a new entry in the CM Glossary. Our new definition for a false analogy is "a laptop to pencils comparison". There, Jesse, fixed that one for you.

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  5. Oh. He must teach Facebook Appreciation.

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  6. Dr. Stommel,

    Fuck you.

    No, seriously.

    FUCK YOU.

    Why don't you get down off of your high horse and join us down here in the trenches. Maybe then your views wouldn't be so skewed by your rose-colored Division of Continuing Studies glasses. I guess when your students are 2- or 3-day-at-a-time lifelong learners, you can afford to be innovative, you can afford to be experimental with your courses, you can go without giving grades.

    Try teaching Freshman Composition to 30 mouthbreathers day in and day out, those that need to be dragged kicking and screaming toward having a critical thought on anything. Try teaching 4 of those sections each term. Or even better. Come down here to Peoria and teach my 3 sections of Prealgebra at CC of the State of Denial. Let's see how your gumdrop unicorn ass deals with the overwhelming apathy of students that have decided early in life that they "can't do" math, when they really mean that they don't want to think about something other than their social media presence for more than two seconds at a time. Come down here and tell me that I'm an awful professor and an awful person because I have to vent about the student(s) that can't be bothered to bring a pencil to class for an exam (sorry bucko, my exams are pencil and paper, not on the computer), students that can't be bothered to put their phones down for two seconds to read their syllabus then complain when they don't follow the rules and have points deducted for it, saying that they didn't know the rules. Then go to the site that shall not be named and commit what is effectively slander because I didn't understand their speshullness.

    Then, come down here and listed to the obvious pride in my voice when I tell you that in 10 years of teaching these Prealgebra sections, some 1500+ students, I have been able to inspire 4 students enough for them to become math majors. That may not seem like a lot to you, but when you consider that 50+% of the students that begin at the Prealgebra level or lower don't earn an Associate's degree, let alone a Bachelor's, this is something that I will continue to be proud of for the rest of my career. By the way, all four have earned their degrees in math and are gainfully employed. I wish that I could inspire more in that way, and I try to every day. However, it's difficult when the first thought of most at that level is when they can get their next social media fix.

    You see Pretentious Ass Clown (can I call you Pretentious Ass Clown), venting is what keeps me from going batshit crazy wondering if I made the right choices in life. It's what keeps me from drinking more than I already do to forget the agony of apathy in my classrooms.

    I've spent way too much time on this. I guess I'll conclude with . . .

    FUCK YOU. Fuck you and the unicorn you rode in on. Fuck you with the unicorn you rode in on.

    PfP

    P.S.: Fuck you.

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    1. Bravo/a! (sorry, Pat, can't remember your gender, if I know it at all)

      This deserves a post of its own, I think, or at least comment of the week (and it's been a good week).

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  7. Students(!) at Brown apparently disagree (though they also admit -- gasp! -- that fellow-students can eliminate the distraction caused by laptops themselves, without faculty intervention. My, this business of showing that one is down with the students by making sweeping statements gets complicated quickly).* **

    They are, sadly, silent on the subject of pencils.

    *Thanks to University Diaries for the link.

    **While I realize that comparisons between more- and less-privileged students can be invidious, this may speak to a point Frod (I think) made somewhere in the last few days: that observing students at a "better" (i.e. more selective) institution can help us see what is and isn't possible with the present generation of students (who are not, of course, a homogenous mass, but do share some common experiences and tendencies). Brown is, of course, a highly selective institution, but it's also pretty devoted to diversity of various kinds, and pretty generous with scholarships. Pushing students with fewer advantages (and more very real obstacles, including crushing out-of-class paid-work loads, which I. like Dorothy Kim, think is behind a lot of the problems we see) in the direction of thinking and behaving more like students at Brown (maybe even the best, most responsible students at Brown, who I suspect are not necessarily the most economically-privileged ones) might not be a bad idea. We need to teach the students we have, but we also need to think about in which direction(s) we want to nudge them (and in which directions we want to avoid letting them nudge us, especially since most of us have many decades of nudging/being nudged ahead of us).

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  8. Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers:
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002254

    Or this one, from Stanford, where Clifford Nass has been studying "high" multitaskers:
    http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist156/laptops.pdf

    Stommel, if you're still here reading these comments, do yourself and your students a favor and READ THE MOST CURRENT RESEARCH.

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    1. Thank you BC! Came storming in here to post something similar and saw you beat me to it.

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  9. I banned pencil sharpeners once. Couldn't take the dust.

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  10. Again, what the fuck, Stommel, what the fuck. Here's my pencil use policy - FUCKING USE ONE. And here's my unicorn-free, evidence-based approach to back up my classroom policy:

    Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science 25: 1159-1168.
    http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/6/1159

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  11. You read that far back in his Twitter feed? I'm worried about you, RGM.

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    1. LOL. Nah, the link was sent in by a few readers.

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  12. This is really quite pleasing to see the number of regulars who go right to the research on this topic. We've batted it around here several times, but it does not seem that Dr. Stommel is aware of it. Or is it possible that this is something other than a glib dismissal of policies that restrict in-class laptop use?

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