OT: UM students, your GSI Is watching you online shop
A Michigan graduate student in Paleontology decided to take matters into her own hands with her students surfing the web during lecture, and the results were spectacular:
From an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education:
"We’re supposed to tell them to knock it off when we see it. But both myself and the other graduate-student instructor found really quickly there’s a bunch of students we couldn’t reach in the middle. And I actually started keeping the list just because it would help to remind myself, at the end of class, there was someone I couldn’t get to in the middle that I needed to pull them aside and say, 'Hey, you shouldn’t watching Planet Earth 2' in the middle of class."
And so she decided to project her list on the last day of class. Genius.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Instructor-Saw-Digital/239841
April 20th, 2017 at 11:13 AM ^
whoh everybody look at this geology expert over here
April 20th, 2017 at 11:01 AM ^
April 20th, 2017 at 11:15 AM ^
Haha still got the doctorate so all is well. But yeah I was not the best student in undergrad.
I was also the weird guy at midterms that nobody in the class had seen before...even if it did have an attendance requirement, starting with a max of a 90/100 just made it a little more challenging. As long as you do the coursework and pass the tests who cares, I realized pretty early i'd rather be doing something else than sitting in a lecture doing the crossword puzzle or reading a book and not paying attention. I learn by doing not by listening anyways.
Same here. So many lectures had significant amounts of fluff that I figured out early on that I could just download the video, play it at 2x speed while I was working out and get a 90 minute lecture done in 45 minutes. Not sure I would have done things differently if I was the one paying for my education at that point.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:03 AM ^
April 20th, 2017 at 11:04 AM ^
This is dumb. It isn't my money they're wasting - I got paid regardless of how many people got good grades in my class.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:25 AM ^
That's really not the point, but okay...
April 20th, 2017 at 11:42 AM ^
As another former GSI, I'm so glad that you took your "instructor" duties seriously. Attitudes like this are exactly why I left academia.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:05 AM ^
in his class, he also smashed a cell phone he had planted on a willing volunteer on the first day of class to prove his point. I must admit though, when you're learning about the history of intercollegiate athletics, you actually want to take notes.
Most ed psych research backs this policy up, as it's shown that people multitasking on devices in class reduce both their own learning capacity and that of those around them.
For example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002254
April 20th, 2017 at 11:12 AM ^
programing.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:14 AM ^
April 20th, 2017 at 11:16 AM ^
a whole classroom of kids wasting time and there's no "MGoBlog (x)" up there. I'm disappointed
April 20th, 2017 at 11:16 AM ^
interesting that "pornography" and "sex tapes" are separate categories (and neither red x'd)
April 20th, 2017 at 11:34 AM ^
they simply don't merit being called pornography. Pay attention to your lighting, people, I simply can't stress this enough.
standards have fallen in adult entertainment. it's video, dude. now that we're competing against amateurs, we can't afford to invest that little extra in story, production value, feeling. people forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone.
+1,000.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:18 AM ^
I'm really glad that laptops weren't commonplace when I was in college. I never would have paid attention to the instructor... ever.
Yeah, me too.
But I didn't escape totally . . .
If they weren't commonplace at work, I'd be wealthy and retired by now.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:29 AM ^
according to your class schedule. There were howls of paternalism when the plan was announced, but it was a good idea and worked reasonably well. No idea if they still do this, but I wanted to take this opportunity to point out I went to Michigan Law.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:38 AM ^
I'm a reader since the HaloScan days, a "real" member for over 8 years, almost never post, and -- as best I can recall -- have never upvoted a post before, but I logged in just to upvote this. Made me literally LOL and spit out my Dt. Mtn Dew.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:58 AM ^
They decidedly DID NOT do this during my years.
the benefits of doing this during 1L, but during 3L I would have found it extremely annoying.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:42 AM ^
April 20th, 2017 at 11:56 AM ^
you want people paying attention to you, you probably shouldn't teach a 1 credit Paleontology class.
April 20th, 2017 at 11:57 AM ^
As a graduate student who has taught roughly 15 semesters worth of undergraduate classes at two Universities this list does not surprise me one bit. Heck, I had a student in a lab on Monday play Hearthstone while doing manual PCR (yes, some classes make students do that.)
But it doesn't stop at undergraduates. Taking graduate courses, there was one fellow student who I noticed would play World of Warcraft during lectures. It was embarrassing.
The problem is, teachers pretty much expect students to bring laptops nowadays. Follow along with slides. Complete a quiz or in-class assignment. Taking notes. The idea of pen and paper and follow along with a lecture are seemingly long gone.
I for one, couldn't care less if a student wants to do their online shopping or read the news. But watching movies, or literally anything else that required sound (headphones included) was beyond my tolerance threshold. Once you've signaled to me you are no longer even listening to the lecturer, then you're just a distraction to the students around you. And yes, you are
I'll get off my soap box soon, but the main issue we have with classes nowadays are mandatory attendance and in-class attendance checks (quizzes, clickers, etc). If a student doesn't want to be there, don't force them to be there. They'll just end of being a distraction to others. He'll learn soon enough that not paying attention won't do him any favors with his grade.
On a side note, there's too much hand-holding in colleges nowadays for my like. I have to keep track of everyone's grade, and remind them weekly of it. I don't know when it happened, but I for sure had to keep track of my own grades and my own assignments when I was in college. If a student misses an assignment, why should it be the TA/GSI's obligation to get in contact with the student and get them the material they missed. Students need to toughen up and seek out solutions to their own problems. Come for help. Ask for things they missed. Stop expecting to be spoon-fed everything.
April 20th, 2017 at 12:32 PM ^
"main issue we have with classes nowadays are mandatory attendance and in-class attendance checks (quizzes, clickers, etc). "
^ All of this.
If this class in the OP had mandatory attendance, then I don't know what they were expecting to happen. But if this was voluntary attendance then the kids who show up to not pay attention are idiots.
"main issue we have with classes nowadays are mandatory attendance and in-class attendance checks (quizzes, clickers, etc). "
iClicker should be forbidden at the Univ of Michigan. It's a crutch and leads to poor educational practice like social pass and weak lectures. And yet more and more profs keep moving toward it.
Don't want to come to the class? Think you can ace the class without attending? You're an adult, dont come. The exam is your responsilibty, prepare as needed.
Credit should never be issued for attendance; this is not kindergarten. Exams are assessments designed to measure competencies. All courses should have educational goals or competncies to be achieved by the end of the semester. Effort is not a competency for any discipline except for perhaps PE.
Grades for lame-ass homework assignments? Even worse, online quizzes **written by the publisher of the textbook**? (like CHEM 130)
What an epic waste of time. Not only are these assignments so poorly designed to the point of being useless, but they indoctrinate laziness and coddling among students. We assign practice problems as a suggestion for you to prepare for the exam. If you choose to not prepare for the exam and not try the suggested problems, that's your choice and as such you will live with any consequences (grade). (like CHEM 210)
Professors want iclicker to make sure students pay attention. OK, so here's an idea - try giving a better lecture. If you actually think iclicker or mandatory attendance is an option, you're so out of touch with the elements of pedagogy that you should probably stop whatever you are teaching and pause to educate yourself about how others learn.
It's really not rational though to expect more - professors are never trained in how to educate others, and often when they are it's by other professors who have no background in pedagogy. As long as this paradigm persists, our institutions of higher learning will continue to be severely flawed in their pursuit to educate.
Whomever said earlier in this thread that this is not a financial transaction is correct in a sense; if it were, universities woul;d have adopted a much more successful educational strategy years ago.
April 20th, 2017 at 12:20 PM ^
These kids and their damn cat videos.
April 20th, 2017 at 12:27 PM ^
April 20th, 2017 at 12:45 PM ^
My personal favorite as a TA/GSI was the kid who sat down directly next to his TA, pulled out his phone, then proceeded to watch Uber cars drive around the screen for the entire lecture. Like, he entered in an address and watched the cartoon cars circle around it.
I mean, what the hell. That's just straight psychopath stuff in any context.
My favorite experience was lecturing and watching a student play online poker in the reflection of the glass case containing the AV equipment in the back of the lecture hall. Really distracting until I figured out what it was.
Pulled the kid aside at end of lecture and told him not to chase the inside straight. He was ... chagrined.
A little OT, an observation from long ago:
When the instructor (on whatever level) says "Folks, lecture is optional. I won't be covering anything that's not on pages X through Y in the textbook," I'd say maybe 20-25% of the people bother going to class. That's probably the same percent that are "audio" learners (or, people who benefit from the spoken word). (Aside: These are probably the same people who assume that I'd prefer a three-minute voice mail to a three-paragraph e-mail. NO.)
I'd much prefer reading the book and I think that's true for the majority of the students. It would be nice if that option were explicitly presented more often. (STEM classes map to this better than humanities, of course.)
Where possible, I avoided lectures and read the book (again, mostly STEM stuff).
Put another way: If you can get by with the book or online resources, FFS stay home and avoid distracting your classmates who actually get something out of the lectures.
If I'm ever an instructor, I will fight hard to make sure lectures are 100% streamed and fully optional.
There's an interesting divide within this thread about what lectures are for.
These last couple posts (and a lot of others) regard lectures as one way of conveying knowledge (knowledge that may be learned effectively in other forms). If that's the case, it does mean they're largely a waste of time that students could better spend in other wasy. And that may be true for some lecture classes where the mission is simply knowledge transfer (though I doubt this is ever the main mission of any college level class).
On the other hand, there are others (and this is my attitude as someone who regularly teaches lecture classes) is that lectures are an opportunity to demonstrate how an expert in a particular field attempts to formulate and answer particular questions relevant to the class in question. In other words, the lectures are a way of modeling how to think within disciplinary boundaries.
In this latter version, obviously, lectures aren't just information dumps (though they do contain information vital to the class) but attempt to teach intellectual process that students can then apply in their own work. This kind of lecturing requires a lot more engagement with the audience, my lectures always include discussion where students make sense of various written or visual sources and link them to the broader explanations (I'm a historian, so interpreting primary sources in context of broader narratives is at the heart of my disciplinary practice).
That kind of teaching disciplinary process and thinking works better the smaller the classroom gets (indeed, it's at the heart of seminars), but it's still possible in lecture form. In many ways, it can be better if students realize what's going on is that an expert is demonstrating the practice of their discipline. But it requires student engagement that's fairly difficult if a large portion of the class is buying $240 worth of turtlenecks.
For what it's worth, I ban laptops from my class because they seem to impede, in my experience, the process of thinking I'm trying to convey to students in the lecture itself.
the idea of teaching you how to think about the problems. In law school, that's mainly what class is for. In UG I skipped a bunch of classes and did fine. I went to most of my econ classes where a computer isn't all that helpful given the graphs and equations and did about the same (albeit more difficult material).
In my day, we did the Michigan Daily crossword puzzle.
The Daily crossword was done. Undergrad. Med School (first two years). I even partly met my wife over a Daily crossword.
While I appreciate the concern of the GSI, some people pay attention in different ways.
If someone tried to ban laptops everyone would dump that class, shit on them on ratemyproffesor, and/or run to find some excuse for a disability permission slip. Only way this works is in 1 hour discussion/lab, not lectures
Or if they played along...as someone with a hand disorder (i can't take write notes for a damn) i would've been one of the few allowed to keep a laptop and everyone would be leering at me, whining etc and i would have stopped going just to end it
I don't care what you paid to be in the class, it's still a privilege to receive a U of M education and completely disrepectful to the prof and the classmates to be that disengaged.
They do need this lecture of their own behavior, because if they act this way at a job while the boss is doing a presentation they'll very likely be fired
Having said that...most at UM are serious students, and if they're dicking around on the laptop, they're not being challenged or what they're being 'taught' is easily replaced. And that's on the professor and were in not for fear of retribution, i would have responded in that way. She should be glad people are just showing up
Before the internet really took off, i recall sleeping in classes (high school though) because when the material is so rudimentary, catching up on sleep is the best use of the time. I recall someone reading the Daily at lecture and others sleeping with a tape recorder going. I saw a kid at Ross who would screw around on his calculator and never take notes. So this is hardly just a perpetually distracted millenials problem