The Pissed Off Professor

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.