Prepoceros

I’m taking eighteen hours right now. The upside of this is that five of my six classes are online, so I only have eight inflexible hours a week. That also means I have only eight hours to spend in the presence of my classmates.

I have no problem with most of the folks in my class. I like people, really, I do. But there are always those few, you know? Or at least those few behaviors, the ones that drive me batty. Like people coming in late*. People leaving early. People packing up their stuff, loudly, before the professor is done lecturing. People stopping a fast-paced lecture to ask question after question after question until we’re thirty miles off-topic. People talking amongst themselves during class. People’s phones ringing during class.

Are we all clear on this, that it’s rude and disruptive to allow your phone to ring during class? Do we not all find ourselves peeved when others’ phones ring? Leaving your phone on during class, to me, is your way of letting the world know that you are VERY IMPORTANT. I came here specifically to listen to this lecture, but no, I get it, you have issues, they are urgent.

I do understand that sometimes you do have issues, real issues, and that they really are urgent. Sometimes it can’t wait an hour, maybe you really do need to know right now, in the middle of class. Here, let me show you the “vibrate” option on your phone. Look, now you feel like a doctor on call. Isn’t that neat?

I also understand that sometimes you do know that it’s rude, and you mean to turn off your phone, but you forget. It happens. I’ve done it, too. But it shouldn’t happen that often. At least one phone has gone off during each of the seven lectures so far—we as a class can’t be *that* unlucky.

On the first day of class, one guy’s phone rang twice. The next day it rang again. Not an accident. ANGRY FACE.

Then there’s the guy who sits behind me. I noticed on the first day that he had a Game Boy with him, and that he played it the. entire. time. He didn’t look up once, didn’t take notes, didn’t appear to pay any attention to the professor. I assumed that he planned to learn everything from the book and was only there the first day to pick up a syllabus and make sure attendance wasn’t mandatory. I didn’t expect to see him again until the first test.

But he came back. He’s been in class every day, and every day he hasn’t looked up from the Game Boy. I wondered what he was playing that was so enthralling. One day I sat behind him and looked over his shoulder a couple times, catching a glimpse of a profile of some elf-chick character named Anthora or somesuch. Who knows.

Why was he in class? There’s no attendance requirement, and homework is only due every other day. What could he possibly be getting out of being there? Wouldn’t he be more comfortable playing his game at home? Today this question became more pressing when it came to my attention that he was sick. As he sniffled and sneezed through class, I hoped he had allergies. If you want to fill a seat and play your game quietly, that’s your own business, but once you start spewing germs in my direction, I’m gonna take that personally.

Today, though, I finally found out what his deal was. After class, apparently unprompted, he showed the guy next to him this nifty little device he had—a microphone that plugged into his iPod. He recorded every lecture in every class, he said, then listened to them during “cram sessions” on the bus.

Okay.

I remember, when I was ten or twelve, visiting my dad’s alma mater on a family vacation. At some point I heard for the first time that college students sometimes recorded lectures, and I thought this was a FABULOUS idea. If you can get a perfect record of everything the professor says, why bother with all this silly note-taking they’re trying to teach us? Everything! Perfectly!

My dad quickly pointed out, though, that even if you recorded the lecture, you’d still have to take notes sometime. Sure, it’s all there, but reviewing the lecture on tape takes just as long as listening to it live in the first place. Tape-recording can be helpful, though, IF you pay attention and take notes during the lecture itself. Maybe the professor speaks quickly and you’ll want to go back later and fill in the gaps in your notes, or maybe you learn better by listening than by reading, so you need to hear the prof’s voice again to refresh your memory.

But I don’t see any advantage to the way Game Boy dude does it. First, he only gets the audio. That might work well enough in a philosophy lecture, but Advanced Linear Algebra? The prof writes a bunch of stuff on the board, then says “so this one is 0, 1, 3 and 2, 4, 5, and 3, -1, … wait, that’s a zero back there … okay, so alpha is in the span of this vector space over here, so we put this and this together and … .” I don’t see how anyone could comprehend much of that without being able to see the board. The prof is also a non-native English speaker: his grammar and syntax are quite good, but he speaks with a fairly strong accent. He’s almost perfectly understandable in person, but, I imagine, less so in a recording.

But hey, to each his own. Maybe Game Boy dude can ace this course without paying attention in class—if so, more power to him. In any case, it’s not my grade, none of my business. But it puzzles me. Recording lectures you’re ignoring strikes me as a false economy, especially in a math class. I know, I know, no one’s making *me* study that way; I should live and let live, be less critical. Meh. I won’t mention it to his face, of course—I’ll just run away to my little non-anonymous blog and rant about it to the interwebs. That’s totally better.

———
* Yes, I do this. I’ve been between five and ten minutes late to at least half the class sessions so far. Does that mean I annoy myself? YES. Yes it does.

Tags: school

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 8:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.