Timidity and the text message

On the first day of the semester, I notify students that I'm generally tolerant of classroom behavior. I don't take it personally when someone falls asleep (I teach at 8:30 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.; often in inadequately lit rooms), when someone needs to leave early, or even if they need to whisper to a neighbor to catch something they just missed. I will publicly embarrass students for two classroom behaviors:

(1) Reading the newspaper during my class

(2) Sending Text Messages¹

The WVU student newspaper is distributed across campus before the first class. At the end of the day, you can find these papers strewn all over campus (which also is an irritant to me). I'd like to believe that what I have to say in a lecture, of what the class has to do in an activity, is more valuable (at least for the student's grade in my class) than what the entertainment editor thinks of Borat.

Generally, my pet peeves are well known. I tell the students on the first day of class that this is an ego thing for me [might as well be upfront about it]. I don't require attendance. If you're reading the paper, symbolically you are telling me that I'm wasting your time. This leads me into a cycle of self-loathing and despair. Frankly, I'd rather you just not come to class. By and large my students are fairly respectful of me. I rarely see paper reading.

Last year, I noticed several students (always students in the back) fiddling with their phone through an entire class. I realized that they're text-messaging. This pushes all the same buttons for me.

Today, I embarrassed a student for texting. But I did so timidly. Looking at the board, I said: "I hope people aren't writing text-messages in my class." In hindsight, I wish I would have walked back to where this scholar was sitting and asked him to stop directly. Oh well, it its not texting, I'm sure it will be something else.


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1. I would add "talking on the phone" to this list but as yet nobody has had the audacity to try that. I'm sure that will change sometime soon. Last month at the Criminology meetings, during a plenary session, two prominent criminologists answered their phones during the talk. One guy talked for a few minutes leading the guy next to him to start swearing... The crim meetings are a freaking hoot.