Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

Has the good professor considered the fact that the sneering condescension of his hard no texting/no e-mailing rules encourages the very breakdown in civility that he's studying? At one point the landline telephone was the cause of the very same moral panic that people are having about texting and cell phones. It was thought that having instantaneous voice communication would erode the "civility" of letter writing.

Social rules change as the means of communication change. Attempting to preserve social rules at one period of time, whether it's 1890 or 1990 is foolhardy.

View on HN

He's not saying that texting and emailing are problematic in themselves, but that he has a problem with people constantly fiddling with their mobile devices while in his lecture. That impedes his ability to do his job, and short-changes the students who do want to engage with him.

I find it equally irritating if people are messing with their phones in a movie theater. It's not that I want to limit their use of the internet, as that I don't want to be distracted by flashing objects in my peripheral vision when I'm trying to focus on a screen. If you want to text at the same time you're watching the movie then go sit in the back row where it won't impose upon other people.

Civility is not a matter of one technology being better than another, but of not being an ass towards the people in your immediate vicinity.

>short-changes the students who do want to engage with him

I don't see how it does that at all. If the students were being loud or otherwise actively disruptive, I'd get your point. But if my neighbor has her nose buried in her cellphone, I fail to see how that impedes my ability to engage with the professor by taking notes, asking questions, etc.

Some (many) people are distracted by non-participating neighbors. It's somewhat like second-hand smoke.

Is there a study on this? Personally I've never felt distracted by non-participating neighbors (with the notable exception of one guy next to me who spent an 80-minute class looking for porn on Google Images), but for all I know my peers have.

I did read a study on this at some point in the past year, but my google-fu is failing me today. IIRC the results were that neighbors using laptops were distracting to surrounding students.

Talk to some teachers, because it affects them. Teaching a group of uninterested people takes its toll. Why bother making your class a good one if no-one cares? May as well just phone it in. Sure, you could argue "just do it for the ones that do care", but that's easier said than done. And if the teacher is phoning it in, that does affect you.

Of course, we might want to dig deeper on that question. OK, so teaching an uninterested group of people does affect the teacher - why are those people uninterested in the first place? If they are uninterested, do they have the option to not attend?

So one aspect is that it's similar to how people,were disinterested in classes earlier, but with a slight bump because of the stronger engagement to games designed to be skinner boxes, or the impact of constant engagement.

But I'll Assume that it's still only a minor effect.

The part which would bug me is someone using a laptop or device to visibly do something else in class- because it's just far more visible and distracting.

> If they are uninterested, do they have the option to not attend?

Most college students only care about getting the piece of paper that says "college degree".

Any effort above and beyond the minimum required is considered to be wasted effort.

I don't disagree. I'm saying that this is not an issue of civility, but of misaligned incentives.

Sorry, what I meant was that it may be very distracting for the professor who's trying to give a lecture and answer questions while faced with a large number of lecture attendees who seem to be engaged in other tasks. Effective public speaking means making eye contact with people in the audience to get a sense of how your remarks are being received; if there's no feedback available it's likely to negatively impact the delivery of the lecture.

From the student/neighbor perspective I personally do find it distracting to have people around me doing irrelevant stuff in a context like that, but I have a pretty bad ADD so I know that's not typical of others' experience.

Meaningful discussion in class is impossible if huge chunks of the class aren't paying attention. It's not a problem in 500 student classes, but the 20-odd ones it is.

I'd say it boils down to simple respect for other people's time and your own time. The professor is up there spending their time teaching. The students are in an learning environment which a number people have spent their time (or lives) constructing. In addition, by choosing to enroll in the class or in the college the students have agreed to invest a portion of their time learning. Completely ignoring the class and doing something else on a laptop or phone says that the student in question believes the course or college is a waste of their time. While that may be a valid point to make, I feel it is cowardice to make it by ignoring the people around them. It could just as easily be made by letting everyone know they think the course is a waste of their time and then leaving the course. Even better, they can stay and try to improve it. This way the people who are interested in the course can continue it in an environment where everyone is actually interested in the course. From my experience, something as simple as having everyone paying attention makes a large positive difference in how participatory and enjoyable a course can be.

Even as late as 1990 is was considered quite rude to pay more attention to someone on the phone over someone in person. I don't see the no texting/e-mailing rules as any more than an extension of that.

Also "sneering condescension" for enforcing rules in his classroom?

> Has the good professor considered the fact that the sneering condescension of his hard no texting/no e-mailing rules encourages the very breakdown in civility that he's studying?

The professor has a responsibility to teach his students. Not just an ethical one, but a financial one too. If he can't teach effectively with people texting/emailing then he has a responsibility to restrict those activities such that all his students are getting what they paid for.

I might suggest that a student failing to heed his classroom rules might constitute a breach of civility. He could easily have made getting caught equate to failing the class (this is a class on civility after all!) but he didn't, which indicates to me that he has some understanding of what civility is. He merely asked her to leave.

I think you are being too harsh, but generally on the right track. There is a valuable lesson to be learned about civility, but the place to start is inside the classroom, between teacher and student, and between the students. In the teacher's mind, the children are bad. But the real situation is that the students are sick. This is very much like the change starting to come with regards to treating drugs as a health issue, not a criminal one.

The right place to start is with equanimity and respect for society. Equanimity because interacting with people in real life is sometimes rather painful, and you can't take things back. Respect for society is similar to respect for the parents: this crazy, evil, dysfunctional society sort-of raised you (and your parents). Society is responsible for providing you with literally everything you know - even the basis for the views you have that loath society. This requires a kind of humility that is very difficult to impart. Usually it comes (if it comes) after a person has been self-sufficient and recognizes the very real trade-offs they might have to make in order to achieve even a fraction of their goals (which is precisely what happened to their parents, most likely).

Of course, all of this is far too much to ask of a single class. He sort of jumped at the students from one, relatively random direction (there are lots of other problems that weakness and disrespect engender, like lack of self-control, depression, etc) and certainly there are not shortage of well-meaning people honing in on some narrow error mode that is really a symptom of something much deeper that takes years of effort to overcome. In any event, a teacher who grows so easily angry when his students demonstrate ignorance of the very thing he's trying to teach might consider the real possibility that he's not fit to be teaching.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com