Timeline for How to handle lecturer who doesn't let me use my phone?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 12, 2018 at 0:40 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | N.B., finally, "learning styles" is a myth with no research evidence to back it up (albeit, a very popular myth). danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html | |
| Nov 12, 2018 at 0:39 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | Yes, it's painful to see students assigned to a course beneath them; personally I always make the offer to skip class and only show up to exams. This is all the instructor can do now, and even that is significantly bending the rules we've been handed in places. If you don't like that fact, then we should support things like teachers' unions and academic freedom more than we currently do, because various court recent rulings have established that administration can dictate whatever it wants in these matters. All we can do is try to maintain a civil learning environment in our specific room. | |
| Nov 12, 2018 at 0:36 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | On top of other comments here: It sounds like I'm about the same age as you, and I've made a career in academia while it sounds like you haven't. Point: A lot of time has passed since we were in the 6th grade and your friend now at a state university (rounds to 40 years), and institutions have changed a lot in that time. Teachers have much less power than they used to vs. administrators! (E.g., see Ginsberg, Fall of the Faculty). I have been told to explicitly say, "Faculty have no control over registrations."... | |
| Nov 8, 2018 at 1:15 | comment | added | Brent Baccala | @Aaron, you make some really good points there. Letting students try to test out is a neat idea; it's not perfect, but it's a big step in the direction of evaluating students to put them into appropriate classes instead of just assuming that they're ignorant of anything that doesn't appear on a transcript. Our current educational system is based on a model of coerced learning - mandatory education until you're 16 or so. It's done a great job of achieving 90%+ literacy rates, but has severely compromised education for good, self-motivated students. | |
| Nov 8, 2018 at 0:49 | comment | added | Aaron | +5! If I knew when I was 20 what I know now I would not have attended college if it weren't for employers wanting to see the paper. For self-motivated people who self-teach from books, college is often an obstacle to learning, not an assist. If I had not gone to college I would have learned more about my field than I did while in college, both because of the mandatory classes of what I knew already and for the slow pace of the rest. That is why, when I became a teacher, I generally let my students try to test out the first week of class; those happy with their test-out grade loved it. | |
| Nov 7, 2018 at 23:26 | comment | added | 1006a | Your advice from "Back down for the sake of the entire class" seems helpful, but before that you seem to be answering a question from your friend, rather than the one from the OP. The OP doesn't mention anything about being mis-placed or too advanced for the class (in fact they seem to need to look things up online to even be able to understand the lecture, so if anything perhaps the class is too advanced), let alone having discussed such issues with the prof. | |
| Nov 6, 2018 at 16:10 | history | edited | Brent Baccala | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
deleted 6 characters in body
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| Nov 6, 2018 at 8:57 | comment | added | Dave L Renfro | thinks the student is playing games, so some of the other students will think it's OK to play games. This is definitely something teachers think about regarding establishing classroom policies, by the way. | |
| Nov 6, 2018 at 8:55 | comment | added | Dave L Renfro | The recent (3 hours ago from my present time) update to the answer and some of the comments are completely overlooking certain points raised in other comments. In fact, the professor/teacher might have been told by a course supervisor (or department chair, or someone else in higher authority over the particular class) that the department policy (or "calculus 2 policy", or whatever) is that cell phones are to always be put away in class. There's also the impact the use by one person has with others in the class, who may not know what the student is doing and (continued) | |
| Nov 6, 2018 at 4:47 | history | edited | Brent Baccala | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
actually answer OP's question
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| Nov 4, 2018 at 4:08 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | Although I agree with this answer, it has absolutely nothing to do with phone use, so it doesn't belong on this question. | |
| Nov 3, 2018 at 17:27 | comment | added | Ken Draco | +1 upvote from me. I'm very disappointed to see this answer at the bottom, and not at the top. This means that people simply DON'T CARE. I'm not implying this answer is perfect. Basically, I have to ask myself if I should withdraw from this specific website (Academia) as 99% of answers are useless and only reinforce somebody's ambition or complacency. Hence it's usu. too much time wasted to find helpful answers like this on, which was so severely downvoted. | |
| Nov 3, 2018 at 2:54 | comment | added | Kimball | I'm not saying university systems are perfect, and I agree we should improve placement systems, but the situation is very different from elementary school. For one, we have thousands of students coming in each year with widely different backgrounds, and we don't have the resources to carefully evaluate them individually in the beginning of the semester. | |
| Nov 3, 2018 at 1:42 | comment | added | kcrisman | Sorry, I meant ask the prof for some challenge problems. Your friend can ask you too, naturally. | |
| Nov 3, 2018 at 1:41 | comment | added | kcrisman | The faculty member usually cannot do anything here; universities have very strict registration rules that you have to move heaven and earth to violate. Dr. Whosit also may have a few hundred people in class and not even know your friend. In my experience, once you hit the 40-student mark, it's very hard to know every student well enough to suss out this kind of thing - and if your friend isn't complaining and the teacher has a 4/4 load, that would make it even harder. I (seriously) suggest your friend ask for a few challenges, like solving the brachistochrone problem :) or serving as a tutor. | |
| Nov 2, 2018 at 23:32 | comment | added | Brent Baccala | @Kimball, IMHO, if a student is bored by the material being taught, it is the collective responsibility of the school, both faculty and administration, to do something about it. My sixth grade teacher did not act in isolation. She brought the matter to the guidance department and the principal. Why shouldn't something similar occur in a university classroom? | |
| Nov 2, 2018 at 23:04 | comment | added | Kimball | FYI, typically it is not the professor who decides what classes students are in. Also, many students who've had calculus at high school don't actually know many of the things taught in university calculus (see also Dunning-Kruger). | |
| Nov 2, 2018 at 20:15 | review | First posts | |||
| Nov 2, 2018 at 20:22 | |||||
| Nov 2, 2018 at 20:13 | history | answered | Brent Baccala | CC BY-SA 4.0 |