A New Beginning

I've been blogging for several years in different sites, but I thought it would try an account here. I try to look for suitable occasions in which to make a new beginning, and since the Chinese Year of the Rabbit is around the corner, it seemed as suitable as any. (I'm not Asian, by the way.)

It is extremely windy where I live. If not for the wind, it would be a warm day. This is a recurring climactic phenonmenon where I live. As things go, it is a mild climate. At least we aren't snowed under, as the breathless media coverage proclaims of the Midwest and the East.

To tell the truth, I'm also procrastinating. I need to prepare lesson plans for tomorrow's classes, and it isn't a pleasant prospect. I wish I were enjoying these classes more than I am. Part of it is that they are so large. Another reason is that the students are bored during the middle of the academic year. Absenteism is up, although they have been warned about the effect on their grades. It is also dispiriting to see students typing away at their laptops while I try to engage them. Mine are not lecture courses, they are participatory courses, so I do feel as if it they are undercutting me. However, I'm not the only one who experiences this.

Case in point: during the first week of classes, I went to observe a Psychology professor. She is a long-standing state representative who is now, apparently, out of office, and has returned to teaching. While she was introducing her course, a class on "Sex and Gender", I noticed the back row of students busily typing away and looking at their iPhones. One student had a computer and was viewing a basketball game that was being played by the lowly New Jersey Nets. He pretended to be taking notes, and at times he would offer a careless remark that made it seem as if he was paying attention. He wasn't, something which was evident both by the quality of his remarks (they didn't necessarily pertain to the topics being discussed at those particular moments), and also by the way he was transfixed by the screen.

Much has been said about this being the multi-tasking generation, able to carry out several tasks at the same time. Studies by educational experts as well as psychologists and other professionals have also shown that the quality of effort given to each task decreases when you lose focus, and that the myth of the efficiency of multi-tasking is precisely that, a myth. Each task is completed more slowly and there is significant impairment attributable to this inability to dedicate yourself fully to one task.

If this were my class, perhaps I would have been inclined to do as the professor was doing, and ignore it for the present. She had to have been aware of what was going on, even if she didn't have a view of what the student was really doing with his laptop. However, since I could plainly see what was happening, I felt indignant. Students have enough distractions without having to put up with this kind of behavior, and in their case, they are more likely to join in out of a sense of solidarity with other students, feeling as if their own lack of commitment and boredom has been validated by another student. The fact was that he was distracting all the students who were sitting behind him, and who didn't have the luxury of being able to move since there was limited seating. Those other students were reluctantly writing anything down, this despite the fact that the professor was a known figure who was doing her best to be stimulating and engaging, which is a far cry from some of the professors I remember from my undergraduate career who would drone on hopelessly without looking at their students. Not all of them, but a few memorable ones.

I try not to be like those indifferent professors who I knew back then, and I always try to gauge the involvement of my students. Distractions such as the one that I described in the Psychology class are happening in my classes as well. Unfortunately, tomorrow I'm going to have to make a cordial reminder to the students who are doing this to stop. It is in my syllabus that they should not engage in this kind of behavior, and that they are to turn off their electronic apparatuses. The thing is, if I remind them in a forceful manner, it will freeze the rest of the students, and they will be less willing to participate. That is one of the trade-offs.

Enough of this rant. Time to get back to work.