My family was tech savvy by ’80′s standards, we owned a Commadore 64 and would spend hours programming games, but our schooling was mostly pen and paper, with a bit of PC thrown in at tail end – closely guarded (and hoarded) by the watchful tech/geek teacher, you know the one. So our Google of the day was yesterday’s teacher, all-knowing, all-seeing, the ’Sage on the Stage’.
Some teachers lament those days, where all classrooms were but a stage, and all the boys and girls merely players. Some teachers today are not willing to move off the stage. They feel menaced by the proliferation of gadgets in their teaching space. With swords drawn they charge bravely into the masses of hun-like techno-brats, but as cavalier as they may be, they cannot defeat the surge: resistance to gadgets in the classroom is useless. The ‘Guide on the Side’ will prosper.
Students today, weaned on gadgets and the internet, have access to information unrivalled in history. They can validate a teacher’s assertion with the click of a button. Yet we find ourselves at that strange cross-roads where there is still much debate on how to use technology in the classroom. A recent New York Times article analysed the benefits of technology in the classroom and noted, “In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.” With the focus so autogenous on how to integrate technology into measurable learning outcomes, it is sometimes forgotten that the technology is already there, not from the tech savvy educational efficiendos, but from students themselves, downloading useful apps en mass: like the Element app, the best periodic table I’ve ever seen; HD Note Taker, which allows students to download and annotate class notes onto their tablets; Encyclopaedia Britannica, the World’s most regarded reference source.
The possibilities are limitless, but still sadly ill-defined. And until such time that someone somewhere (Sir Ken, where are you?) recognises that technology need not be organic to the education milieu, we will see confusion and frustration by the teachers, who battle bravely in the trenches. The article below, published in the Campus Review (vol.22, No.1), was written by a part-time University Lecturer Dan Kaufman, who, on being blown away by social networkers and tweeted to the point of distraction, decided that his days of being a casual lecturer are over.
It’s 4.40pm on a Friday and ever student is staring at me attentively. They are not peering at Facebook, they are not tweeting, and there’s complete silence in the classroom.
I’d like to say this is because I’m such a great teacher but sadly there’s another reason – namely that for the first time in five years of casual teaching at universities I have lost my cool and screamed at one student to shut the frick up or get the frick out of my class.
And yes, in reality I said far worse words than frick.
A nervous tick begins above my left eye. It had begun. I have become one of THOSE teachers.
In my defence, at least I lasted five years before I snapped. Five years of seeing students feedback results that have absolutely no bearing on whether or not I get work the following semester (I have found that the better the results, the less likely it is I’ll be given the same subject to teach again).
Five years in which Facebook went from being a novelty to a lifeline for these students, and one of the banes of my teaching existence. And, five years of doing my best to help students only for them to have so little respect that they talk over me in class.
I can only hope that the twitch above my eye isn’t permanent.
When you start teaching you always think you will be different. You think that you will be the cool, down-to-earth teacher that students will like and respect, and that they’ll listen to you because you know your stuff and are there to help them. You are not like the others. Then, as the weeks turn into months and then years, you realise you are not. You’re just another chump in these kids’ eyes, teaching material that many of them in their infinite wisdom and life experience don’t they they even need to learn.
And, if you think I’m exaggerating about how little these students think of us, try searching for your name – or subject – on Twitter. It can be horrifying.
I found all this out by accident. I once had a student who seemed – well, to put it nicely, he seemed psychotic. In every class there’s always one person who asks questions that have no bearing whatsoever to the subject or who smiles in which a sinister way that you just know he understands how to use a firearm, but this particular student was so special that curiosity got the better of me and I searched his name on Twitter.
It was like opening Pandora’s box – all of a sudden I came across all of these tweets not just from him but from a range of other students bitching about the subject the lecturer and, shock and horror, myself. If you thought young children can be cruel, wait till you see what bored 19-year-olds who they are cuttingly witty can tweet.
But Twitter is nothing, not a jot, compared to that cursed Facebook.
If TV is the opium of the masses then Facebook is the crack cocaine, and I sincerely believe it’s sapped my students’ attention span to a point where my cat can focus on subjects for longer. Every time there
S a pause in my teaching, every time my students think I’m not looking – and sometimes wqhen they know I’m looking –their eyes go back to Facebook.
It’s not just me, either. When I walk pass other people’s classes I peer in to have a look, and sure enough, I always see Facebook’s sinister glow emanating from students’ mobile phone and notebook screens.
We are now educating a generation in which most successful students are the ones who can multi-task the best – and I can take it no longer. If students really believe that the minutiae of their friends’ lives is more interesting than Chomsky than [nic] I, for one, am no longer interested in teaching them.
I’m done. And at the end of the day, that’s what disheartened me the most: that many students – at least in my experience – are not all that interested in learning for the sake of learning (and thankfully there are, bless them, some fantastic exceptions in each class). They are not even interested in learning to become good at whatever profession they are interested in 0 they don’t think they need to. For me, this just sucks the air out of my sails.
You see, after years of teaching practice-based subjects, I began teaching more theoretical compulsory subjects that forced me to read texts that I became interested and sometimes even excited about. If not for the subject I would probably never have read them, and yet the ideas did, at the risk of sounding hokey, enrich me. I love ideas and I honestly did my best to encourage my students to find the ideas of interest as well.
I tried to be light-hearted in class, I gave practical examples and applications, I always tried to relate theories to their own lives, but nope – I rarely received a spark of interest from the students. Finally, I found from talking to other tutors and to some students the reason for their apathy – namely that in many core subjects the vast majority of students just don’t do the readings.
This was across the board in everyone’s classes for the subjects I taught, with students just cherry-picking specific texts for assignments only. One student told me it was an open joke across the student body that the readings were ignored, another even criticised her tutor to me for forcing students to read texts out loud in class out of frustration. I actually think the tutor hight have been onto something because by the end of most semesters I was invariably the only person in class who had done absolutely all the readings.
To be honest, I think this is a whole separate issue that academics should take seriously. Admittedly, I’ve only been teaching communications and humanities subjects, and perhaps students in other disciplines do their readings more diligently (I certainly hope medical students do!) – but I don’t believe attention spans are the same now as they were 20 years ago.
In a previous issue of Campus Review there was a comment piece by first-year students about how txting hasn’t affected literacy levels. This might be true – although hardly any of my students know how to use a comma – but there’s no doubt their attention spans are shot to hell.
People read less (except if it’s on Facebook) and for shorter periods of time, and let’s face it – academic articles are always far more convoluted than they need to be. If a simpler word would suffice instead of a longer one, a PhD candidate will always use the longer one. This might still have worked in 1990, but from my own experience it doesn’t work now.
And so here I am, a ranting casual teacher who’s packing it all in. To be honest I was only ever a mercenary casual – unlike my colleagues, I never wanted a PhD or an academic career. Instead I just wanted to teach and, to be honest, to avoid a full-time job. However, when faced with the prospect of another year staring down gossiping teens with vicious tweeting tendencies, going back to the 9 to 5 grind is starting to look good.
