Teaching and Lecturing at a State University

Not a surprise, small devices are creeping into the classroom and being turned on and off while I am "lecturing." (What they hell is that?) Listen, I hate everything new. I don't like not being able to double-space after a full stop when writing these words. But anyway.

Observing a colleague's class, I found myself noting how many students were checking their e-mail, hand-held phone logs, or browsing dietary web sites.  Not that there was a mile-a-minute information overload, but there's participating and there's coasting and whittling away at the time and then abruptly getting up and leaving.

In my class, at the height of my lecture -- my lecture -- on the "red rubber" scandal in the Leopoldian Congo, in which Sudan and other policemen and merciless Kurtzes riding them made a dent in the idea of unregulated "free trade."  Really slavery and labor theft and butchery and terrorism.  Somewhere around the end of the lecture and it is true the class was pretty spellbound at the picture of the boy with his hands cut off, a fellow at the very very back of the class -- the place were guys seem to stroll in and out late in the class period -- pulls out his PDA and starts thumbing the keys.

I told him to put it away. When it dawned on him that I was talking to him, I said, "Yes, I am that kind of professor."  And then I seemlessly finished, calm as a sea urchin.

I hate.

I hate rudeness in my face. I hate having to be the one to "educate" in this way: Yes, it is unacceptable to do as you are doing in a classroom.

I asked Bernie C. about this, my Jewish history professor hallway neighbor. He sees no difference between devices, lap tops, or young women dressing inappropriately, necessarily. He also feels that lecturing is a pre-print culture, medieval form of conveying information that is on the way out. Easy for him to say. He's already thinking about retiring in a few years. Why not just make videos, he says, and the students can run them over and over at their leisure.

I'm sure some young people learn better outside the lecture format.  But isn't the point of the lecture format also to teach students to be able to hear a presentation and draw the important points from it, writing down these points, and combine them with readings, to form a body of knowledge that can be verified?  Why is listening to a person speak about something a vanishing mode, to be replaced by data in words and pixels?

Is everyone insane?