This is Crap.

(Or Why the Ban of Technology in College Classrooms is Stupid.)

I wrote this blog in class on Tuesday. Due to it's considerable length, and just not caring enough I didn't transcribe it until now. I hope you enjoy it. It's verbatim, with the exception of a few punctuation and spelling corrections.


So here I am, sitting in my Tuesday night SpecialEd class. The teacher is this hispanic lady who is roughly 65 years old. This is being written literally 10 minutes into class. She's banned the use of laptops and cellphones, so I decided, "Well I'm not going to pay attention anyway, and I haven't written a blog in a while so screw it, I'll just handwrite the damn thing."

The thing that sucks is, writing this, I'm paying way less attention to this lady than I would if I were just sitting on my laptop. This is one of two classes that has banned all technology during class time. By giving us this rule that no technology can be used, in my mind, you're not respecting my right to use technology, and whether it's because you don't think i'll pay attention or what, it means you're treating me like a child. I'm a big boy. I'm almost 22. (Yikes!) All in all it means I'm not going to respect you back.

IMeanwhile both of these classes have optional-mandatory online coursework. Meaning, "It's up to you to do the coursework online. But if you don't do it, you'll automatically fail the class." Okay, so I get there's online materials and work, but you're not going to allow me to access any of it during class? Yeah, no. That makes perfect sense to me too.

What it comes down to, is that both of these professors have had "years of experience" in their fields, and are now teaching college courses. Bully for you! But guess what? We don't care! Just because you've been doing your thing for years and are an "expert in your field," it doesn't mean you know how to teach a class/lecture full of college students.

Day 1. Both these teachers ban technology under the ruse that "Multi-tasking doesn't exist!" Claiming studies have discounted it, and that in reality you're just shifting focus rapidly between two or more stimuli. Well... I don't know who let the secret out... but duh! I'm not saying my brain can magically comprehend everything around me, but if I can surf the web, and still take notes, and listen to you when you make a point, that's really all I need to do.

I've talked about multi-tasking and me before, (hyperlink here,) so I'm not going to go into another long tirade. All I'm trying to say is just because you've been in the education field for years doesn't mean you know how to teach. Best professor I ever had didn't care what we did in class as long as we sat and stayed quiet. He didn't take attendance and in fact told students not to come to class if they felt remotely sick. (He had small children.) He made the class interesting, he made us want to show up, and to interact. He respected our ability to learn. So some classes I would sit there, laptop open, and just listen. Then when he made a point, I'd ask a question, and he would just roll with it. He complimented a kid in class for the great drawings he made. He let us do our thing, while he did his thing. I might not have "learned" as much facts or methodology in that class as I've been forced to in others, but I learned how to treat people, how to act, and a lot about life. And that was just talking to him during and after class.

Not letting college students use laptops or cellphones in class is dumb. Our generation, especially the freshmen, has grown up with computers as an integral part of our daily lives. Saying "You can't use a laptop unless you have a note from disability services," is the equivalent of saying, "I know you can type faster than you can write, but the threat of Facebook scares me." It's not practical. I can see where they're coming from with cellphones, but once again, if you respect me enough not to make a big deal about it, I'll keep any texts short, sweet, and I'll go back to listening to you when I'm done. If I miss something, that's on me. I'll take that burden. And if I keep missing things, i'll wise up and save my texting for later. Even the naive freshmen are still adults, so treat students like we give a damn, and maybe we will. But if you're going to give us the "Teacher knows best," routine don't expect us to drop everything and believe you. We're not (all that) dumb. Sure, we'll most likely do as we're told, but you're going to be staring at a sea of dead, uninterested eyes, who most often then not will be staring down pretending to take notes while we text friends or tweet about how much your class sucks.

If there's one thing I've learned from being a comm. major, it's that change is coming. Media is becoming more and more ubiquitous, and is rapidly approaching omnipresence. These professors are tying to teach us as they were taught; trying to fight the times. Stop. We know you don't get this whole "technology" thing. But then maybe it's time to get out of the teaching game. Maybe technology is the reason you got out of your field in the first place, I don't know, but you aren't helping anyone by trying to bust us back to the days where students sat quietly with pencil in hand while the teacher drones on. (I picture the classroom scenes in the Indiana Jones movies.) Moves on, and let our generation do what we do best: use technology. There's a reason you ask for our help when you can't get your computer to work. Time to stop punishing us for it.

Jim

P.S. And if this teacher knew anything, it'd be that there's no public wifi in this building. So... you're dumb. (Link.)

Yeah. I was pretty pissed. Oh well. I take none of it back. Let me know what you think. 

Ode to the Worst Class I've Ever Had The Displeasure of Taking

College is a wonderful place. There's plenty of opportunities, there's plenty of girls (or guys (if that's your thing)) to swoon over, and there's plenty of interesting classes you can take. Unfortunately, after the honeymoon that is most student's freshman year, in my case freshman and sophomore years, you settle down with a major, maybe a minor, and you have to take some classes that aren't so interesting.

Now I don't remember if I've ever gone into detail on my schooling and whatnot, but I'm now officially a Communications major here at the good ol' University of Massachusetts. I'm also unofficially an Education minor. It's a Catch-22 system, where you can't be a minor until you have completed all the courses, and it never tells you what courses you need to take online, because you are not a minor. It's a dumb and flawed system.

But what's more dumb and flawed is one of the classes that I've needed to take. Now I won't go into specifics of when I had to take this class, or which class it is specifically, but let me tell you about it. This class had a promising title, offering to teach us about international things, implying that the general scope would be scattered, you know, internationally. Turns out international, in this context, stands for "Africa, India, and China."

Now, I wouldn't mind studying Africa, India and China, except that's all we did. I was under the assumption that if our teacher was from Great Britain, we might actually take interest in the U.K. and Europe, but apparently I was mistaken. My Bad.

Anyways, this class was painful to go to. Not only did we have the class in a room that always had the heat blasting from 5 gigantic radiators, even during the fall when it was already high 70's, but the class was rarely taught by our actual teacher. Most of the time, we'd walk into class, and we'd have a guest speaker, talking about something irrelevant, and non-consequential to the class. Then a few times, we'd walk in to class only to find that all 8 of the TA's were going to parade up to the front of the class and tell us about all their time spent in the peace corps in, oh wouldn't you look at that! Africa. The few classes she actually taught? Yeah, she just stood up there and talked at us. It was painful.

So that's what happened from a "teaching" perspective for the first few classes. From a "student" perspective I did the following:

• Read a book
• Listened to my iPod
• Played PSP
• Played Trivia/Solitaire on my iPod
• Played Mahjong on my Laptop
• Read the Newspaper

There was no wireless in this building for some godforsaken reason. Who knows why. Perhaps they thought the heat would make us pass out before we tried to use it. Perhaps they were right.

I will take this time to tell you the sole, shimmering gem of wisdom I've gleaned from this class. Having all that time of sitting in class allows one to accomplish tremendous feats. I mastered the alphabet. Backwards. Yes. Through repetitive writing, and filling two pages of paper, I, Jim Redding, have conquered the alphabet both forwards and backwards. I feel accomplished. I also wrote a short screen play for a Star Wars spoof created by my bro-host Kevin and myself. We are thinking of selling it to Robot Chicken. They seem pretty cool.

After the Midterm Reviews, where everyone slammed her for having an awful class, she decided to merge the second and third papers of the class into one final paper. At this point I need to mention the discussion section of the class. The class only met once a week, with a discussion section immediately following the class itself. Two and a half hours of class purely on one subject is brutal, even in the best of classes. This was living in a hellish netherworld where time falls to a standstill and you are prodded with a pointy stick for what seems like eternity.

Now my TA was nice enough. Arguably too nice. Hailing from, oh weird, AFRICA (specifically Nigeria), she was all about being our friend, and us being buddies. So the first couple of classes, we'd go in, and instead of you know, having class, possibly getting through everything so we could get out early, we'd sit down, and have to find a neighbor and ask them, "How was your day?"

Cue the prodding.

This is the last place any of us wanted to be, and we were forced into niceties with strangers, that nobody really wanted to be there with. This eventually escalated into "Friendship Groups" which consisted of 5 people sitting around and asking each other how our days were. This was quickly replaced with us asking each other why they had made the horrible decision of taking this class.

This also might be a good time to note, while after the midterm beat-down, our teacher started teaching, and actually used PowerPoint, we weren't graded or tested upon anything we learned in class. The entire grading system is based on homeworks, done using readings provided to us online, and turned in to discussion. We took a few weeks off after we figured this out, skipping the class and blending in with the crowds as we filtered off to discussion. It was, unfortunately, all too easy, and still horrifically painful.

I have explained to you my rage, and agony I have experienced for participating in this class, but this does it no justice. Should you ever be in a similar position to that of my own, be wary of international classes. I beg of you. Should you ever stumble into a class where there is a promise of "International" and "Learning," be wary. Be very wary.