Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Dealing with Bored Students

I think this InsideHigherEd.com column(HT: Reynolds) has a valuable little lesson for all teachers:

Some professors threaten to confiscate students’ cell phones if they go off during class. Laurence Thomas has his own approach to classroom distractions. If the philosopher at Syracuse University catches a student sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class, he’ll end the class on the spot and walk out. It doesn’t matter if there is but one texter in a large lecture of hundreds of students. If you text, he will leave.

Last week, when a student in a large lecture — in the front row no less — sent a text message, Thomas followed through on his threat (as he had done just a few days earlier). And he then sent the university’s chancellor, his dean, and all of the students an e-mail message explaining his actions and his frustration at the “brazen” disrespect he had received in class. In the e-mail, he noted that the student who sent the text message is Cuban, and that last year, two Latino students had started to play tic-tac-toe during his class.

Set aside the race issues that have gotten bollized up with this incident. It’s still an over-reaction by the professor. Students have been bored forever. And they’ve found ways of idling away the time forever. I suspect some of Socrates’ students passed notes back and forth. I got kicked out of a law school course - not just a class session, but the whole course - for doing a crossword puzzle in class. (My students have a hard time believing a prof could do that and today most profs probably wouldn’t have the stones to do it. I don’t) Texting or web surfing or what have you is just the up to date version of an age-old problem.

This issue is not going to go away. In fact, it’s going to get more common as the so-called Millenials move through the system. For Millenials, multi-tasking is a way of life and staying connected 24/7 via text messaging, IMs, and email is preceived as an inherent right.

Having learned that yelling at a class does little but generate really negative student evaluations, I long ago decided to draw a distinction between stuff like texting and conduct that actually disrupts the classroom experience. Ignore the little stuff but be tough on stuff that matters.

Personally, I find that injecting a little humor and keeping the pace up is pretty much all that’s necessary to deal with the little stuff.