The Pissed Off Professor

We’re in the midst of week ten of a sixteen week semester, and last week was midterm time, so over the weekend, the last significant wave of drops took place.

For the better part of yesterday, I had the feeling I was teaching at the Twilight Zone’s main campus.

Several of the students in my classes this semester are repeaters of one type or another: either they’ve taken one level of English from me and are continuing at the next level, or they are repeating a class with me.

The student I once referred to as Ms. Numerous Deaths and Tragedies Girl did it again. Well, sort of.

There weren’t a string of deaths and/or tragedies, she just stopped showing up. And again, she was earning an “A.”

Sigh.

I have a hard time reconciling where I stand when it comes to technology in education, and I blame my students.

I see the benefits of many technological advances; however, much of the positive is outweighed by students’ failing to take appropriate advantage of the tools at their disposal.

Here are a few examples:

E-mail:
When I was in school, I had to take the office hours of my professors into account if I wished to communicate with them outside the times and days we met in class. Often, my professors’ office hours conflicted with other things I had to do and/or were on days or at times I was not on campus.

This forced me to make a point to speak up in class if I knew it was my only option, or if meeting with my professor(s) was difficult.

It also meant I had to prioritize my activities: I often had to make a special trip to campus at the expense of my free time, or arrive early/stay late on class days to be around during a particular instructor’s office time. Occasionally, I even had to change a work shift to meet with a teacher.

The good part about meeting with an instructor face-to-face is the ability to truly interact. It’s not often something is missed or misunderstood when having a live conversation. It also allows instructors to delve more deeply into a student’s inquiry. The added benefit for many students is learning their teachers are not nearly as frightening as they think they are.

Today, students (and parents and other teachers) expect instructors to be available via e-mail. This never seems to work as well in practice as it does in theory. Too many students try to converse via e-mail, and it’s just not the correct medium for it. Other students replace in-class participation with e-mail, and that does no one any good. Then there are the students who think e-mail is like text messaging: that they’ll get an immediate response—at 2 AM—on the morning the essay they’ve had three weeks to write is due.

My favorite abuse of e-mail goes something like this:

Professor Hansen, did you get my e-mail?
Yes. Did you get my answer?
No. I haven’t checked my e-mail in a few days. What did you say?

Electronic communication is so readily available, it is abused: no student would take the time to go to an instructor’s office in person, ask a question, and then walk out without an answer. Likewise, few students would take the time to meet with their instructors to ask a question the answer to which is readily available on the course syllabus or a handout. Because e-mail is so effortless, students abuse it.

The Internet:
Like e-mail, the internet wasn’t a staple of my educational years. I shall never comprehend the reason so many people think everything they see on the internet is true and comes from a reliable source.

I know: not all of what is heard on the radio, nor all of what is broadcast on television, nor everything printed in newspapers and magazines is true, but most would agree the probability of accuracy is greater in any of those arenas than on the internet.

I once had a student incorporate into his research paper the fact that Roe v. Wade had been overturned because he’d found it in an article in The Onion. Now, I’m not ready to claim with absolute certainty the situation would have been different had this student held a copy of The Onion in his hands, but I can promise you this: he couldn’t have performed an internet search and gone directly to the article thereby avoiding the other content and the opportunity to ascertain the type of paper The Onion is.

The Word Processor:
When I was a student, I had a typewriter. I went though the painstaking steps of lining up a sheet of paper, typing exactly what I’d written/revised/edited onto the page, and turning it in. Like many of you other old timers out there, I recall the process involving many flubbed pages, a ton of preplanning to prevent even more flubbed pages, and the utter frustration of trying to type over liquid paper (once it existed).

Most of my students have never seen a typewriter in person let alone used one. The concept of preplanning an essay seems nonsensical when one can copy and paste things here and there at will, so real writing has gotten lost. Given the ease with which everything else happens on a word processor, the thought that one might have to manipulate the formatting is out-of-the-question. (In fact, many word processing programs are so helpful they auto-format things, and if the computer decides it’s right, it must be—whether or not it looks anything like the sample a teacher has passed out.)

The Bottom Line:
I am extremely thankful I can communicate with people electronically. I love being able to learn about a variety of things at the touch of a URL. I get downright giddy when I’m working on a piece and can make changes at will without wasting paper or time. But all of these things are what they are for me because I spent the first twenty-five or so years of my life unable to do them.

This is the reason I sit on the fence when it comes to technology in education: I’m not certain the tools of modern society are the most effective learning aides.

Back in the beginning of October, Christina Mallon, a teacher at Williams Field High School in Gilbert, Arizona, was placed on paid administrative leave for performing a cheerleading routine during one of her classes.

The performance was captured by a student on his camera phone video recorder, and the student subsequently uploaded the video to YouTube. The publicity eventually led to the teacher’s suspension/paid leave while the routine was (and continues to be) played and talked about in the media.

What I find most disgusting and amazing about the whole event has nothing at all to do with the teacher or the performance.

No one seems to care about the student’s behavior: he recorded the instructor without her consent, and unless he had his camera phone in plain view, he most likely violated the law.

If he did violate Arizona law by secretly taping his teacher, the moment he uploaded the video, he violated federal law.

But the student’s misconduct isn’t the issue, right?

Let’s imagine for a moment we were back in the stone ages—you know: that long-ago time before the every-one-has-one cell phone. For this event to have occurred, the same student would have had to carry a video camera to class, take it out, and point it at the teacher—an act that would have been a bit harder to hide even with the smallest of camcorders. And let’s not forget, YouTube was born in February 2005, so as we traveled back in time, the video never makes it to millions of viewers.

I wonder: does Williams Field High School have a student cell-phone policy in place? If they do, I’m willing to bet my last month’s paycheck the student who recorded the teacher violated that policy.

But let’s not worry about the student’s misconduct.

While watching the report, the comments of several parents struck me: in a nutshell, they each said if cheering was what it took to keep the students’ interest, then they were all for it. Yeah Team. By all means, let’s leave it up to the teacher to entertain the children while said children are in the classroom—after all, learning for learning’s sake is just plain boring.

Then there were the students who made comments describing the routine as “a waste of students’ educational time” and “immature,” and several who argued “teachers get paid to teach us [. . .] not to cheer” and who complained students “are here to learn.”

Now, I’m confused.

If the students are all for learning, why do educators have to devise ways to keep them engaged?

If the students are all for learning, why are they playing with their cell phones in the classroom?

One other thing concerns me profoundly, and it’s another issue no one is talking about: the inherent copyright protection for original work and performance.

Just because a teacher delivers a lecture or performance in a classroom does not mean the information and/or performance is unprotected. In many cases, the lectures, performance, handouts, and course materials of an instructor are considered “derivative works” and are copyright protected.

It is entirely possible the recording and posting of the performance in question violates United States copyright laws.

But I’m sure the student didn’t know that.

Let’s go smaller: posting what amounts to the instructor’s original work and performance is a violation of YouTube’s policy (emphasis below added):

6. Your User Submissions and Conduct

B. You shall be solely responsible for your own User Submissions and the consequences of posting or publishing them. In connection with User Submissions, you affirm, represent, and/or warrant that: you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize YouTube to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website and these Terms of Service.

I’m going out on a limb here: I don’t think the star of the show gave her okay to be uploaded and featured on YouTube.

My refusal to allow cell phones into my classroom is a subject of much debate among my students: given I would never cheer in my classroom, I wonder what my problem is?

Welcome to my contribution to Blog Action Day!

What’s it about?

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

In honor of the day, I decided to look into some things I could do around my home to make myself and my family more environmentally friendly.

I visited The Union of Concerned Scientist’s Green Tips Page to see what I could do, and here—in no particular order—are the five most doable and/or interesting things I found:

1. Dry Cleaning Clothing is Really Bad for the Environment

In about 85 percent of dry cleaning shops [the] solvent [used in cleaning] is perchloroethylene (or “perc”), a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers both a health and environmental hazard.

While I don’t do a ton of dry cleaning, I do some, and several articles of clothing I own are marked Dry Clean Only.

It’s not rational to throw these items away, and it seems I don’t have to:

Dry cleaning is not always necessary; clothing makers often place the “dry clean only” label on tags because they can list no more than one cleaning method and can be held liable if an item is damaged when the owner follows the listed procedure. [M]any of these items can be safely washed at home, either by hand or using a washing machine’s delicate cycle.

2. Appliances account for about 20 percent of a household’s annual electricity use.

Reading up on household appliances, I learned a lot about my refrigerator/freezer.

Refrigerators have to work harder to stay cool if they are located near heat sources such as dishwashers, ovens, heating vents, and direct sunlight.

I can’t do much about this, but I will certainly keep it in mind if I ever move and/or redesign my kitchen.

There are actually recommended temperatures for both the refrigerator and the freezer: between 37 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit (ºF) for refrigerators and 5ºF for freezers.

Check your settings!

Keeping the refrigerator and freezer full will help in cold retention, so if either is sparsely filled take up the extra space with water-filled containers.

Very cool! (Pardon the pun.)

3. Many dishwashers have internal heaters.

This means the machine heats the water so one’s water heater doesn’t have to. Often, water heaters are set to 140ºF to accommodate the heating needs of dishwashing. For those of us who have dishwashers with internal heaters, we can turn our water heaters down to 120°F.

4. What about Washers and Dryers?

While there are times one needs to use hot water to wash—and these times are rare—there is no reason to RINSE with hot water.

Drying multiple loads of laundry consecutively will allow each load after the first to make use of the residual heat that remains from the previous load. The last load can likely be dried using the cool-down cycle as the remaining heat will do the trick.

5. What Impact Am I Making on the Environment?

I visited The Nature Conservancy’s Web site to see just what kind of damage my family was doing.

The good news is that we are below the national average. The bad news is we are well above the world-wide average. The worst news is there is very little we can realistically do to reduce our numbers in the near future.

Afterward

I certainly learned a few new tricks, and I’ve already begun implementing them; however, my overall feeling in all of this is how difficult it is for change to occur at the consumer level.

I had little control over the design of my kitchen, but the contractor did: why not mandate designs that take into consideration appliance location for the most environmentally friendly results?

In fact, why is it that every single home now being built isn’t environmentally friendly, energy efficient, and solar powered? (Each time I read about alternatives, the ideas began with “the initial cost is higher.”)

Why isn’t every vehicle now being manufactured a hybrid? (Can you say the power of the oil companies?) I can’t just get rid of the vehicles I have, but down the road, there is no doubt our replacement vehicles will be hybrids.

My frustration stems from the fact that we have the technology and know-how to make obsolete many of the products most harmful to our world, but because of politics and profit, not enough is being done to ensure responsible consumers can afford to be green.

Until that time comes, I’m keeping up with my good habits, and adding a few new ones to my arsenal.

Hail to the Earth!