connected lives redux
Mark Edmundson, an English professor at Virginia, has a new essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the puzzling lives of today’s college students. They are energetic, ambitious, widely-traveled — if they have the money, which seems generally true of Edmundson’s students —, always connected and thus always distracted. Edmundson informs us that at parties a quarter of them are talking on their cellphones — which strikes me as unlikely, by the way, since they could hardly hear over the music: they’re much more likely to be texting — and just a few months ago he happened to catch a glimpse of a laptop screen in his classroom which revealed to him that the student was watching a YouTube video and emailing rather than taking notes. On the basis of this disturbing experience he has decided to ban laptops from his classes and rededicate himself to teaching students the value of patient and single-minded reflection.
I don’t disagree with Edmundson about much of this. Wheaton College, where I teach, has wireless access throughout most of campus but not in classrooms, which I think is exactly right. If my students had full internet access in my classes, I would ban laptops also. For many years now I have considered my primary task as a teacher to be educating students in the best use of a powerful but widely misunderstood and underemployed technology, the book. What I don’t get is the Chronicle publishing a 6500-word essay on “the connected lives of today’s college students” as though it’s a new phenomenon.
That’s one point: follow-up coming.
With all due respect, though your students may not have internet access in your classes, the ones with laptops are still probably watching movies and playing a few internet-independent games in between taking notes.
— Katherine Philips · Mar 11, 04:54 PM · #
I have no doubt about that, Katherine! But I think (perhaps this is sheer hubris) that I make my classes lively enough that few students are driven to seek relief. That level of distraction I think I can handle. But internet access means that interruptions can come unbidden in the form of emails, chats, and in the rare case tweets. That’s the kind of thing I want to avoid.
However, since I posted this a student has written to say that she does indeed have full internet access in our classroom, though the college authorities have denied implementing that. So I guess my Edmundsonian laptop ban will be going into effect immediately. . . .
— Alan Jacobs · Mar 11, 05:01 PM · #
I really don’t believe that college parties are filled with people constantly on their cell phones; how are you going to get drunk and get laid? (Plus, I’m still going to college parties, and I don’t see it.)
In the larger sense… one of the harder things for me to wrap my head around was the fact that most people just don’t dig school as much as me. I know this is incredibly dorky, but back in junior high school I looked forward to being in higher reading group, because there, there would be people who really loved reading and English, and everyone would really engage… and then I thought it would happen when I got to high school, and then I thought it would be in college. Then when I got to 300 and 400 level classes and it was all English majors, everyone would love English and want to participate, but to my dismay, it wasn’t the case. Then I suspected that it was because I didn’t go to a good enough undergrad, but my friend Nick, who went to Yale, reported that, in fact, half the kids in his classes hadn’t done the reading, either. Only now have I finally gotten to a place where everyone is there because they want to be there, and are engaged and interested in the subject matter. Of course, it can get so competitive it kind of moots the point, but I digress….
— Freddie · Mar 11, 07:21 PM · #
Re: “Only now have I finally gotten to a place where everyone is there because they want to be there, and are engaged and interested in the subject matter.”
Agreed, Freddie. I have learned over the years that one of the most important messages I can possibly communicate to my students is simply this: You don’t have to be here.
— Alan Jacobs · Mar 11, 08:14 PM · #
My laptop was too much of a temptation, even in classes I REALLY enjoyed, so I just stopped brining it.
I’m not really sure what the goal of The Chronicle is, the only time I read it is when I’m killing time while I wait for a meeting with my Academic Dean, but it often comes across as a place for professors to complain to each other. And honestly, the point of this article didn’t seem to be about students’ dependency on technology but rather grumblings about my generation’s intellectual integrity (while mixing in a few compliments to appear even handed).
That being said… Triple majors? Taking 7 classes a semester? Who are these robots?!
— Dave · Mar 11, 08:20 PM · #
This piece by Edmundson makes more sense if you read his Harper’s essay from 1997 (http://public.clunet.edu/~mccamb/edmundso.htm). I’m looking forward to you additional comments, AJ.
dw
— dwright · Mar 12, 03:18 AM · #
David (as in dwright), I don’t think I’ve ever seen that Edmundson piece from Harper’s. Very interesting. Because of the flu, my reason has ben unseated from its customary throne, but upon its restoration we should talk about this.
— Alan Jacobs · Mar 12, 04:21 PM · #
“Triple majors? Taking 7 classes a semester? Who are these robots?!”
They’re merely your classic overachievers. I knew plenty of them, back in my day. One of my best friends had four majors—and she graduated summa cum laude, so one couldn’t level against her the typical charge of handling multiple majors poorly.
Also, if your classes are set up idiotically enough (often according to some other scheme than the usual three-hours-per-class model), you can easily find yourself taking nine or ten courses without technically having an overload. Were I—heavens forfend!—a school administrator, I’d reform such scheduling systems long before I dictated the number of majors each student could declare.
— Katherine Philips · Mar 12, 04:25 PM · #
Alan: If you read the Harper’s article, it would be worth digging up the Letters section of the December 1997 Harper’s, where Lisa J. Kijewski has this response:
“Last fall I was a student in the Freud class that Edmundson uses [in his essay]…I have encountered few classes in my university career whose objectives were so poorly defined and whose assignments were so amorphous and ill-explained. Edmundson, with his obvious contempt for undergraduates, wasted my time and my money, and then used his experiences in front of the classroom as fodder for a sardonic critique of my generation’s intellectual incompetence and consumeristic attitude.”
It continues. It’s worth your time.
— Steve Casburn · Mar 20, 02:40 AM · #