Cell Phones in the Classroom and Other Observations

I took a class this past spring semester. The class was fascinating purely for the subject matter. The professor was engaging, insightful, and challenging. And the students certainly seemed, for the most part, engaged, enlightened, and challenged. Except when I sat in the back. Then I could see the whole of the seedy electronic underworld.

The New York Times recently asked whether there was a place for smartphones in the classroom. That's sort of like asking if there's a place for the 500-pound gorilla in the living room. Like it or not, it's there.

Here, in brief, are my top 5 observations from my semester of being educated with (by?) Millennials:

1. Men seemed to use their laptops more for things unrelated to class. Women seemed to favor using their cell phones discretely tucked underneath the table. The laptop abuse on the back row was so distracting that I sometimes sat on the front row where I could concentrate better.

2. I've heard for a couple of years now that students seem to buy a lot of shoes during class. I have to admit that my internalized misogynist assumption was that this referred to women. However, I didn't observe a single shoe transaction by a woman this semester. I did, however, see a couple of men buying shoes. Where does this discretionary income come from? I think I had two -- maybe three -- pair of shoes in law school.

3. The laptop abuse was not nearly as rampant as I assumed it would be. The use of laptops increased directly as you got closer to the back row. On the very back row, about 75-80% of the laptops were being used for non-class purposes. This did not, however, stop the guys (sorry, it was all guys) from commenting frequently in class. As you got closer to the front of the room, the maximum abuse was 30-50%. At the front of the room, 0%.

4. I watched others in front of me as they took notes. Most of them were taking verbatim notes that I couldn't imagine were going to be that helpful when it was time to study. This professor slowly moved you toward "aha" moments. It was engaging in the process, not transcribing it, that allowed you the moment. That being said, knowing that all those people in the class had transcripts of what was going on was enough to make anyone lose their mind and think that having your own transcript was the only way to effectively compete.

5. I haven't taken a class -- unless you count CLE's and conferences -- for about 15 years. I don't usually take my laptop with me to sessions at conferences, and my cell phone is generally buried so far down in my purse that it's not worth the effort to do anything more than turn it off and send it back down to the bottom. However, if I'd used my laptop in this class, the temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, etc., would have been virtually irresistible. Classes are different than CLE's and conferences, where a ton of information is packed into 45-minute or hour-long sessions. Regular class, though, are a journey. I'd forgotten what it was like to have a sense of where things were going but have to wait for others in the class to catch up before we could move on. I also forgot what it was like to have difficulty keeping up. I had both of those experiences again in this class. Both the boredom and the panic leave you wanting an escape.

I probably won't wait another 15 years before taking another class. Watching an excellent professor teach over a period of months was a great learning experience, and watching my students learn over a period of months was equally compelling.