School has started, and it looks as if my co-teacher Tom McDonald and I have been blessed with an eager, albeit small, group of students interested in the journalism course we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re offering at Highlands.<\/p>\n
Strange, but the eight years since I retired have at once given me confidence and made me more meticulous about planning lessons. Mainly, I find it necessary to move into the 21st century and put aside some of the bromides I used before.<\/p>\n
The language of journalism, mainly what we call Associated Press Style, hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t changed a great deal since 1999, when I taught my last journalism class. Yet, regarding the use of technology, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m feeling like the student, not the prof.<\/p>\n
It would be easy to fall back into delivering lecture 107, a practice I swore I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never cultivate.<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
In my first year at Highlands, in 1971, I vowed I would never be like some instructors here and elsewhere, who taught the same courses \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in the same way \u00e2\u20ac\u201d year after year. So memorized did these lectures become that as students, we could predict exactly which session would be devoted to “inductive reasoning,” for example.<\/p>\n
Many years of teaching certainly made access to knowledge easier, and the temptation was great to go ahead and use last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lecture notes and quizzes. But no, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to be like them. Being in a field like journalism, whose syllabus often comes from that day\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s front page of the newspaper, I wondered how someone in my field could fail to keep up with the technology and the history-in-a-hurry characteristics of daily news.<\/p>\n
Someone who teaches Plato, Beowulf or the Augustan Age, for example, might be able to get away with recycled lectures as, comparatively speaking, there isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that much new research being conducted nowadays.<\/p>\n
Did I ever realize I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d become one of the “elder statesmen” who are resistant to change and unable to adapt to the ever-developing technology? When I retired, yes, we used computers, but mainly for word processing and layout of the campus newspaper, La Mecha. For my purposes, the Internet was barely nascent, not the essential tool it is today. Professors in most departments here now factor in and require Internet use in their classes.<\/p>\n
When my co-teacher Tuesday spelled out the rules about the use of cell phones in class (“prohibited . . . unless you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re speaking to, or texting, a source about a story”), I wondered about the all-thumbs technical expertise I can offer compared to the adroitness likely to be exhibited by our students.<\/p>\n
Several patient people, including my three sons, have tried to teach me how text messaging is done, but they gave up. In fact, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve even failed to teach me the importance of text messaging, not just its mechanics. “Why not just speak to the other person?” I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d ask. “Aww, Dad, you just don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand,” one of them said.<\/p>\n
Remember, just entering names and numbers into a cell phone directory can be daunting. How then does a cellularly challenged person like me acquire the skill and the patience to poke each button as many as four times in order to ask, “Howya doin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122?”<\/p>\n
“Howya doin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122?” spelled in full, is far too mundane for an experienced text messager. Someone with know-how probably would enter “How R U? But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more trouble than spelling out the entire message. And it goes against the desire of a decreasing number of teachers to get people to spell correctly.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Apparently students have used text-messaging as a means of furtively exchanging information. A student going for a drink in the hall could easily relay exam answers to his buddy in class, all under the unseeing nose and unsniffing eyes of the teacher.<\/p>\n
Wednesday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Optic contains an article on West Las Vegas Schools\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 attempts to deal with texting and general cell phone use. And my last stint in the classroom at Luna Community College taught me that cell phones can be set to vibrate instead of to ring. And once, when a student felt a bit of buzzing in her hip pocket, she took the cue to announce it was time for her to leave class.<\/p>\n
My wife and I spent many hours in high-speed metros in Copenhagen last year and marvelled at the total obsession many Danish youths have with electronic gadgets. One attractive teen, who we thought could easily be surrounded by admiring young men, instead sat by herself wallflower-like, apparently lost in thought. Occasionally she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d let out a laugh. “Is she telling herself jokes?” I asked Bonnie.<\/p>\n
As more passengers entered the car, I sidled next to the teen who I discovered was engaged in a lively “chat,” possibly with her boyfriend. The medium? Text messaging. But why didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t she just speak to her beau instead of needing to use acronyms like “LOL” for “laughing out loud”?<\/p>\n
Unless someone can walk me through this electronic maze and explain in terms even a 68-year-old can understand, that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a need for text messaging, I will remain unconvinced of its importance or utility. And even when people walk as they talk on cell phones, what are they saying?<\/p>\n
First call: “Hi, Mom. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m coming out of psych class. Just thought I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d call.”<\/p>\n
Second call: “Hi, Mom. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m heading for the restroom. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll call you right back. OK?”<\/p>\n
Third call: “Hi, Mom. Did I tell you I came out of psych class and that I visited the restroom?”<\/p>\n
Most cell phone conversations and text messages on campuses, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m convinced, are merely the result of having removed their emotional training wheels: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m in college now, and even though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m all of a half hour away, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still thinking of you.<\/p>\n
Wisely, WLV and other school districts are coming down hard on the use of cell phones, with provisions so draconian that kids might even have their Nokias confiscated. True, parents may argue that a cell phone protects the child. But how were children protected before cell phones? Emergencies were handled through a phone call to the principal\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s office. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all!<\/p>\n
Now, however, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re facing the realization that invention is the mother of necessity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
School has started, and it looks as if my co-teacher Tom McDonald and I have been blessed with an eager, albeit small, group of students interested in the journalism course we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re offering at Highlands. Strange, but the eight years since I retired have at once given me confidence and made me more meticulous about planning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}