THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I entirely agree.  I know, at least, that I’m able to check email and blogs and the rest while watching baseball and hockey games, and I miss an absolute minimum of the pertinent action.  I have to imagine that your average college student does the same--naturally develops a balance between attention to the professor, and attention to the computer.

Part of the “problem”, I imagine, is that most young people are used to multi-tasking at all times.  I just realized the other day that the only time I’m really doing only one thing is when I go to the movies.  I have to think that people who are used to recieving information from many different sources at one time feel stunningly bored when suddenly they’re only allowed it from one.

The information given by teachers just cannot keep up with the information being taken by students.

It’s true that professors/teachers must engage their students to be effective, and that’s hard work that requires effort on the part of the teachers. However, students have an obligation to hold up their end and make an effort to engage, otherwise they’re just buying a diploma. The basic agreement is to pay attention to the teacher. If you don’t like the class, either have the guts to talk to the teacher about making it better, or have the guts to not show up. I take from the piece that both teachers and students should agree that merely showing up and getting nothing out of it is a waste of time.

I’m stuck taking a class right now that I don’t want to, because of various requirements. I’ve already been accepted to a grad school program, so this class is meaningless to me. But I have to come to class because attendance is “required”. Why should I pay attention?

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.  Today’s academia can be summed up all too often as, “I paid my money, where’s my degree?”

An education can be viewed as a product (and administrators are increasingly viewing it as such). However,IMHO, doing so cheapens the learning process and ultimately fails the students by encouraging an environment less conducive to challenging their minds.  After all, the customer is always right....

I’m mostly ambivalent on all of it.  Quite frankly I disagree with the author of the article that having alcohol in the classroom would be a bad thing too...But thats just me…

But regardless...don’t these professors give tests and such?  If a student can surf all day in a class and still pass the tests then either the prof can just be replaced with the book ("Here, read this") because he or she is not letting the student in on anything not covered in the the book (or at least, not things deemed important enough to put on a test); Or the student really is a good multi-tasker...which some people are.  You want to get their attention?  Demand more by simply putting it on “the test.” Hell, thats the question most asked by students these days anyway.  “Will this be on the test?”

Either way, I really don’t care though.

I cannot agree with this post. I think TangoTiger is missing a big part of what education is and is not. What it is not is ‘entertainment’. It is simply in a different realm of the human experience. Consequently, it should not be judged by the same criteria as other forms of entertainment on its ability or lack thereof to maintain students’ attention. This does not, in any way, lessen the professor’s obligation to engage students to the best of their ability, though.

Regarding the idea that multitasking is now a way of life and something that young people are proficient in - again, the mistake here is that multitasking works well when the cognitive load is low for every task except the primary task. That’s why it’s easy to watch a ballgame and write email at the same time. You can focus on the email with intermittent checks on the game. If nothing interesting is happening, you go back to your email. If something great is happening, the email can wait.

The academic process is fundamentally different. Not infrequently, a professor must engage a difficult concept or go through a complex line of logic to get where s/he is going.  This requires the kind of concerted attention that multitasking typically precludes. Even if the professor is boring, that doesn’t mean the subject matter is. Basically, students are in class twelve hours per week (give or take). Seriously. They can’t pay attention to something that might allow them to grow intellectually for about 7% of their week?

Last thought. I’m a grad student who frequently TA’s for two very engaging professors - one of whom is on the History channel all the time. These guys are good, smart, engaging and funny. It doesn’t matter. I see undergrads watching videos, playing games, IMing, etc, all the time. This isn’t exclusively about the professors and their ability to keep students’ attention.

I lied: one last thought. You want entertaining professors? Be prepared to pay a whole hell of a lot more in tuition. In order to free professors from their other professional obligations like committees, publishing and student advising, the university would have to hire many many more people to keep the system moving.

I see undergrads watching videos, playing games, IMing, etc, all the time.

And what’s the impact to those students?  Did they all get A’s and B’s?

Even if they didn’t, so what?  They’ve determined by their actions that they are willing to receive whatever grade they ended up with.  That’s their breakeven point.

You might as well put a hidden camera on them after they leave class, because even though they are supposed to put in 3 hours of study for every hour of lecture, I can guess that most don’t do that.

What does it matter that they ignore part of the lecture in the class any more than they ignore part of the study time at the library?  They are surfing and partying.  Heck, doing the surfing in class, might give them the extra study time for the library.

This is a control issue, not an education issue.

The whole idea of mandatory attendance for a university lecture or seminar is strange.  What makes university a good experience is that students are there because they want to be. They are old enough (hopefully) to appreciate the consequences of non-attendance. 

Once the student is there voluntarily, there are varying expectations of participation depending on the class.  Certain kinds of computer use may be inconsistent with the participation that a seminar leader/professor of the class reasonably expects.

@Tangotiger
You’re absolutely right - they’ve determined their grade by their actions. And some do well, and some do not. But there is a legitimate “distraction” factor. In one incident recently, I saw perhaps six students all keeping an eye on a student’s laptop while she watched a video. Maybe it’s their choice, but the distraction was real. Admittedly, this is anecdotal.

I disagree about the hidden camera point, though. The issue is their behavior within the classroom. I would argue that in the context of a classroom it is disrepectful to do many of these things. Even if these students do not see it as a respect issue, most students would acknowledge that many professors do see it this way. And consequently that’s part of the problem - the differing expectations and valuations regarding classroom behavior. On the occasion when students prepare presentations for the class, they expect the attention of the instructor. While this isn’t exactly the same, I think it’s pretty close.

Regarding the issue of control, I’d say yes, but in a different way. Some professors try to create an environment conducive to learning and such distractions make it harder to achieve that environment. The control is not about power, but about empowerment. Part of what I tried to communicate in my previous comment was that some students are not responding to a perceive lack in or fault of the professor, but that they would surf the web no matter what the professor did.

We may disagree here, but that’s ok. The discussion (hopefully) leads to better solutions.

Love your work, Tangotiger. Keep it up.

The distraction issue is a big one. It’d be the equivalent of someone posting “It’s a trap” and “Are you the biggest idiot ever?” in every thread here. Yes, it’s possible to step past it, but I don’t understand why anybody should feel compelled to tolerate it.

In my opinion, it is up to the teacher to teach and up to the student to learn. If the student chooses not to learn then his or her grade will reflect that. If the students somehow can master the material while playing games or surfing the web, then so be it. But if they can’t master it, then the teacher reserves the right to fail them or give a bad grade.

Absolutely agree with tangotiger and Dan.

At some point you have to let people be responsible for themselves.

I don’t get the “it’s about power mongering”.

It’s about being a dedicated educator at the highest level and being frustrated by those who don’t respect their educations.

It’s not a lot different than a coach being troubled by players who don’t give maximum effort.

"It’s not a lot different than a coach being troubled by players who don’t give maximum effort.”

-> Yes it is, because the Players are required to give maximum effort, by a contract that they are signed.  In fact, the players are compensated for their effort.

Students are paying to be there.  It’s no different from paying for a movie ticket and then not paying attention to the movie.  Waste of money? Maybe, but well within your rights.

You know what helps pass class time? Comic books and graphic novels. gotta love them.

Anyway, I think it’s entirely up to the instructor. I have had good professors mark people absent for not being attention (not fully present), and one even moved some students around in seating to lessen distractions. That was perfectly legitimate and helpful to the learning experience. I have also had good professors who would tolerate anything short of having conversations aloud, including constant texting and web surfing, but it didn’t seem like any of the students minded (or minded enough to speak with the professor about it).

For the most part, I say just let them be. A student’s performance in college typically reflects their effort, so come exam/project/paper time, students will get what they deserve most of the time. There should be some intervention, yes, if some students are getting out of hand, but then you have the questions of what is distracting and how distracting is it, which returns you to the instructor’s discretion.

And the point about paying for a degree: well, obviously, that’s the whole point. There are some majors that you could realistically learn on your own (e.g. business, history [I’m a history major, the majority of becoming an historian is refinement], religion), and all that degree does for you is put you on a platform to be picked out by an employer, while gaining social connections along the way.

A college education is an investment. If someone’s not getting the most out of that investment, it’s on them. If they don’t want to learn, then screw it, they won’t learn.

wow, I spent like forty-five minutes writing this. i hope i clearly communicated what i meant to say.

What I would be most concerned about is if the actions of one or more students doing something else (looking at a video) distract with others who do want to pay attention.

Of course this is nothing new. I’m old enough that PCs where invented while I was in college. Almost certainly obssessive/compulsive, when a good baseball thought came thru my mind it was almost impossible not to fill my notebook with sabermetric scribblings (and I did save some of the best). 25 years later, at work, I do reasonably well stickign to work between 7am and 5pm, but do have SQL codes and spreadsheets to fill a USB drive only a click away.

#14: Less than 1% of all ballplayers are actually paid to play....

Education is in part about deferring gratification, and a student who is not “entertained” enough by the immediate effect of a classroom experience and turns to external distractions such as surfing the internet is insulting the concept of education embodied in the professor and trhe classroom experience.  Sure professors should try to be compelling but learning process just isn’t always a thrill a minute—it can take discipline and concentration.  Indeed there are truly terrible professors, lots of them, who can turn a fascinating subject into a deadly dull experience, but for hundreds of years students have let their minds wander while boring professors drone—bringing wireless enterntainment into that mix seems an insult not to the particular professor but to the concept that education is not entertainment.

Also: how many college students are paying their own way fully through college, as opposed to using the support of parents, or low-interest government loans, or financial aid provided by the university?  Unless they are fully working their way through school, students have financial responsibilities to take their studies seriously.

#17:

And 100% of all people who pay for attendance to something are entitled to do what they want with it, provided they aren’t hindering anyone else, of course.  Should we force baseball fans to pay attention to the game?  Well that would be nice, actually, but if you pay for tickets to a ball game and you spend the whole game knitting a sweater, that’s your right…

I’ve been to Oracle classes where I was surfing and checking stock quotes, and I’ve been to Oracle classes where the information was flying so fast, and in-class assignments were so involved that I had no choice but to pay attention.

As an adult, I’ll decide how to balance my time, wherever I am, and suffer whatever consequences there is.

The only issue, as far as I am concerned, is the distraction to other students.  If all the students in front of me was surfing, that would be better than if only one was: at least, it’s all gets absorbed into the landscape.  In any case, if a student truly feels distracted, make him sit in the first row, or force all surfing students into a “red light district” to the back rows of the class.

Well, in my classes, I don’t permit laptops, at least not just for note-taking.  Call me a power-monger, or whatever, but I’m pretty firm on this.  Here’s my rationale:

If the effect of a person surfing the web or what have you was limited to the particular student in question, then I wouldn’t care.  The student would only be hurting themselves.  This is why I don’t care about attendance in lecture either.

The problem is that it doesn’t just affect that one student.  It affects everyone who can see that student’s computer screen.  If 10% of the student population is surfing the web during class, then it’s affecting almost everyone in the classroom.  And this, in turn, can cause major problems for any attempts to cultivate a dynamic and engaging learning environment within the classroom.  It’s disruptive, and like any other disruptive behavior, is completely unacceptable because it impairs the ability of other students to gain what they want to from a class.

Teaching done right is not just about having people pay attention to you.  It’s about directly engaging the class, cultivating a dialog between you and them, and probably most importantly getting them to think along with you.

This is a hard thing to do.  It requires buy-in on the part of the students.  And getting this buy-in becomes quite a bit harder when students see other students so obviously not engaged.

Classrooms aren’t democracies.  And education isn’t entertainment.  Students are paying money for the opportunity to learn and achieve, and I am not going to permit one student to impair the experience of another student if I can help it. 

If it were a less frequent issue, banning laptops wouldn’t be necessary.  But my experience is that roughly 2/3 of laptop users in classrooms are engaged in activities not related to the lecture/discussion at hand.  And, at least in my experience, banning laptops has resulted in a much better learning environment within the classroom.  Call me a power-monger if you will.  But from my vantage point, cultivating that learning environment is probably the most important part of my job. 

And, of course, if students don’t like it, they don’t have to attend…
-j

As someone who has read THIS website while in class, I fully understand where jinaz and the other teachers and professors are coming from.  It is disrespectful to the teacher and the commitment to learn I’ve made by attending university.

That said, I NEED my laptop with me in class.  There’s no way I can make notes half as detailed and useful by using a notebook. 

During the pause a professor takes to let students finish copying the powerpoint slide, I can finish my notes, email the professor with a question about the lecture, check wikipedia to understand cultural references I don’t get [Sword of Damocles], and get pictures of Trevi Fountain so I understand what my notes mean later.

If the guy behind me is more interested in what bbref page I’m on than lecture, he’s going to be distracted by something anyway even if I’m taking notes by hand.

Of course, if distractions like solitaire and surfing the internet don’t exist in, you know, offices in the “real world”, I’ll take full responsibility for interfering with his learning.

Trev, your instructor should be distributing handouts of her/his powerpoint slides in advance so that people don’t have to copy them down.  Talk about a waste of class time!  Not to mention a massive disruption to any sense of flow or conversation.  S/he could be using that time to lead discussions, have students work through problems, etc…

And if you distribute the slides ahead of time, note-taking becomes much more about writing brief comments or jotting down occasional words or phrases to help your understanding and recapture what is said in lecture.  And lecture becomes much of an engaging experience where you have time to listen, think, and discuss.

I’d also add that I have no idea how people using laptops can take replicate illustrations on the board...which, at least in a biology class, are frequent and essential.

That all said, if I had a student like you who felt his/her ability to learn was being particularly negatively affected by my laptop ban (and I haven’t had anyone voice such concerns yet, though I admittedly only adopted this rule this past semester), I’d probably be willing to be flexible...with the understanding that if it gets to be a problem (e.g. I see other people’s eyes fixated on that person’s screen for minutes at a time), things will have to change.  Sitting in the back row might be an option…
-j

I find that the only site that I have a mutual interest in with the rest of the world (the part of it that I’ve met) is Facebook. I’ve never met anyone in person who reads this site, or any of the other sites/blogs that I read. I can only speak for myself, but when people are surfing the web around me, I’m generally not distracted because what they’re looking at isn’t really of interest to me. When someone sees me reading the book blog, they generally walk away from my screen saying something like, “why would I ever want to know that?” because it’s just not something that they’re interested in.

I don’t think changing images/pages on a screen are enough to significantly distract people from doing work.

Tango, I can agree with your comments as a response to the author of the linked article.  But as a teacher, I think it’s too easy to say that an instructor is power-hungry or that an instructor’s class and lecture are boring.  I teach mainly freshman comp classes, so right from the start there’s a big hurdle to overcome because everyone has to take it.  Very few of them signed up because they were dying to take the class.  But I try to make it interesting and engaging and worth their time, and in the end I think the students learn something about writing and thinking, and I get, for what it’s worth, decent evaluations [stated only to rebut any possible thoughts like, Yeah, well you’re probably one of those boring-ass, looks-like-a-cat, prescriptivist writing teachers who students can’t stand.].  And I’m not going to say, “Kids these days...,” because I was in that same boat too at 18 and 19, when the last place I wanted to be was in some classroom taking a required class.  But all I could do back then was doodle or stare out the window (or read a book).  Now, phones and laptops only exaggerate the problem.  A teacher competing with doodling is one thing.  But competing with texting and surfing the web, well, that’s a lot tougher battle no matter how interesting the class may be.

One last thing… Next fall I’m teaching a class on baseball (not a PE course; focuses on the Chicago Cubs) and I’m using your book as one of the readings.  So if students turn to their phones or laptops in that class, I’m entirely putting the blame on you and MGL…

Blair/25:sounds cool!

***

As for the distraction: again, let them sit in the back row.  I don’t see the problem there.  The students who sit in the backrow don’t even want to talk to you anyway… that’s why they sit in the back row.  They don’t distract anyone.

How fast you see that back row fill up tells you how important some of them find their internet connections.

I believe jinaz has it spot on.

Attendance is not mandatory. If you don’t find it necessary to attend the lectures, then sit in your room and browse the internet. There will be no penalties to you for doing so if it doesn’t affect your performance.

In 99% of cases, computers simply aren’t necessary. How many generations of students made it through without them? Pen and paper is certainly reasonable and effective enough for the task, as well as being a skill in and of itself. Taking a transcript of what the professor said should not be necessary. Catch the main points and jot down reminders for yourself to understand.

And if you really do need a computer, then ask your professor if you can use one in the back row, or whatnot, so it won’t be a distraction.

Because of the computer, my penmanship is now horrible.  I don’t even know how to write a check (cheque) without stopping to think about it.  I can print just fine, but that takes forever.  I can type faster than I can print.  To have me print, and then retype what I print on my computer is a waste of time.

Since there is zero issue (i.e., we *all* agree it seems) with having the backrow using their computers, or creating a “red light district” of computer use (i.e., whoever is there knows what’s going on, and accepts it), I don’t understand why a professor would make it an issue.

There is a solution here that keeps everyone happy.

I’m a little late to this party, but I have been on both sides of this one.  When I taught, I had no attendance policy.  I politely reminded students that they were paying $1.67 per minute for the class (which I pointed out was cheaper than… well, some other things that charge by the minute) I had students who came to class to drop off their homework and did their learning on their own.  I don’t really mind.  If they are getting what they need through just the textbook, then I suppose I shouldn’t be offended.  My goal is to make sure they have learned the material, and they prove on their tests that they have done so.

As to those who surfed the web (oddly, never had that problem too much), I can’t imagine taking that personally either.  Heck, I’m at work right now and I’m distracted by the web.  Humans were not meant to sit in chairs for extended periods of time and focus on one task.  It amazes me that we pretend that this is the way it should be.

I’m not in university just yet, but any class where I take notes requires a laptop for me. My handwriting is simply illegible, even to me. The last time I wrote an essay based exam, I had to dictate it to my teacher after. Perhaps a solution to the surfing problem would be to cut off the internet in the class?

I have to teach some 2-8 hour classes for work, and I actually have an opposite problem:  people sometimes bring laptops to class so they can do (real) work instead.  For some of the classes, I have had some control over the material that goes into them, but for the most part, there already exists a Powerpoint package and I have to present it (although I still have a fair bit of flexibility in what to emphasize and what to say).  And some of the material is pretty dry, to say the least.

So the laptops aren’t a distraction, but it can take away from the value of the class.  I like to think of the value of the class coming roughly equally from three sources:  the course material, the instructor, and the students.  So someone working on his laptop actually causes damage to the other people, since his questions or experiences will not be shared with the class at all.

Further, every black hole in the class deadens the class energy level, and that has an impact on me as the instructor, as I in turn lower my energy level.

That being said, I usually just ignore the laptoppers.  It’s possible that instead of being a black hole, he could be actively hostile and questioning what I’m saying (much of the material is formal training for things they’ve been doing for years (although not necessarily the way the company wants it done)).

Way too many instructors/teachers/etc. believe that because they stand up in front of a group of people they have a special importance in what they say.

I have a boss that gets upset when all eyes are not on him while he is speaking, but what he says has often been repeated somewhere else and has little value.  Many times i have heard people who attend the meetings say something along the lines of “why do we meet?”.

Every speaker’s job is to engage whoever he/she speaks to.  Getting upset because no one listens to you speaking comes off as a little pathetic.  Especially in the work place.

Otoh, I’ve noticed people have become quite rude over the years.  Do people really not know to turn their phones on vibrate?  Do they not know they should not answer the phone and have a competing conversation with the speaker?

I think what we should aim for is less control by the speaker coupled with more civility by those who attend.

Handwriting is a skill that I think everyone should have. If your handwriting is illegible, then that’s a problem. I also think that taking notes so involved that you need to write that quickly indicates a problem with either note-taking ability, the teacher’s style, or a combination of both.

I’d have little problem with people using computers in the back row of the class provided they came up and asked for permission. Small sacrifice on their part in return for a small sacrifice on mine.

"Handwriting is a skill that I think everyone should have. If your handwriting is illegible, then that’s a problem. I also think that taking notes so involved that you need to write that quickly indicates a problem with either note-taking ability, the teacher’s style, or a combination of both. “

I completely agree, but simply, I don’t have that skill. It’s beena problem all my life. I’ve been to OT’s, used special pens, everything imaginable. Nothing worked. The only upside is my english is slightly more legible than my hebrew.