Move over doodling, there's a new time-waster in town. Texting. Perhaps you've heard of it? If you're a college student you've definitely heard of it, as 90% of all students have copped to doing it during class. Professors are mad!
Shockingly, some students have even used it to cheat on exams! Shocking!
Proving history repeats regardless of what the classroom time-waster happens to be, the students think texting is their right and professors think the practice will be the doom of high learning institutions the world over.
Student Tom Markey of Wilkes University, talking to the AP:
"If it's a really boring class, texting is a nice alternative to having to sit there and focus," said Markley, a senior computer science major at Wilkes. But, he conceded, "there are definitely times when it takes away from your concentration. Suddenly you'll be at the end of the period and say, 'What did we do today?'"
Rebuttal!
Laurence Thomas, a popular philosophy professor whose courses have waiting lists, walked out on his class of nearly 400 students last week when he caught a couple of students fiddling with their phones instead of paying attention to him. It wasn't the first time Thomas has cut a class short because a student broke his no-texting rule. To Thomas, texting saps the class of its intellectual energy.
"My job is to engage the class, to give them stuff to think about," he said. "They need to respect that."
The more things change, the more they—oh you know the quote, just as you know there will always be distractions for college students. The ones that really want to be there and want to learn will learn, and the ones that will text incessantly in class and skate by will do so. The rest will fail and have plenty of time to hash out that epic text that just couldn't wait until the end of a 45-minute lecture. [MSNBC]