In the classroom

I had an interesting conversation recently with two colleagues outside of my department. It's funny, it doesn't sound like this should be a rare occurrence, but it sort of is. In academia, we don't mix well across departments. And outside of our building is even worse. I wonder if it's like this in the humanities and social sciences? I know that everything is not the same between the arts and the sciences. Some folks in the arts get the summers off (I wouldn't say all, nor do I even know if a large % of them take the time off), but most (if not all) folks in the sciences work in the summer. This is even if we are only making a 9 or 10 month salary. We'd never get our scholarship/research done if we didn't.

Okay, back to the conversation. It was about students who come to class but don't pay attention. The faculty member who initiated the conversation was speaking about a class where the students bring computers and are working on projects with them, but that he suspects that they are surfing the internet or doing other things. He suggested that he'd like parabolic mirrors in his classroom. I strongly disagree with this. But, this semester has been the worst for students multitasking in my course. At various points in time, I have had students texting, reading novels and/or listening to iPods. I wonder if they think I can't see them? I'm pretty sure that they don't think about if I can see them when they are doing it. But I'm not really sure I know what makes them do it. I know my lectures aren't 100% engaging during 100% of the class time to 100% of the students, but such blatant disregard is a bit astonishing. I've thought about taking points off for students who have been grossly off task. I know all of my students by name, so I could easily do it, if I made a point of keeping track from the beginning. I have added into my grade book this semester notes on students who have participated in class a lot. I could also add notes for students who are absent a lot and/or who are off task a lot. All of this is super interesting to me because I always went to class (I think I missed <10 classes in my 4 years at college) and I always was on task (there weren't so many distractions back then, no cell phones and hardly anyone brought computers to class, but I don't think I would have been distracted even if I had this technology). But I am also of the ilk that the students are adults and they should make their own choices. I have been thinking that I might say a few words about classroom etiquette at the beginning of the year next time around. But it seems that a large number of students forget everything from the first week of classes by the last week of classes, so I don't know how effective this would be.

Hmm... I just had an interesting idea. Thinking back, one of the reasons I went to all my classes in college was because a professor early in my career mentioned (almost as an aside) that we were paying ~$100 for each class hour. I wouldn't throw $100 away, which was how I thought about not going to classes (and not being on task in class). I might be able to incorporate this into my class in an interesting way. One of the things that we do is work on statistical handling of data. I might see what happens if I ask my students how much they think they are paying to come to class and we could do some statistics on the data. We could easily look at the class average and the standard deviation, etc. Then I could tell them what the answer really is. This might be very interesting to try next fall because I'd be teaching concepts while also getting a point across that might translate into improved etiquette.