Say goodbye to jokes?

plea editorial

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I should say from the start that I do not have a monolithic view on what constitutes acceptable practice in the classroom. Surely the decision to record lectures or to ban laptops ought to be a matter firmly in the hands of each individual professor (I exclude from consideration cases that involve documented disabilities) and is not different, then, from such non-technological decisions as taking a stand on the consumption of sloppy Subways in McCosh 10. Surely there is no possible one-size-fits-all policy at a university that offers small seminars in physics and large lectures in film studies, not to mention small seminars in film studies and large lectures in physics. Of course, it is the wise teacher who considers the options with an open mind — and who allows his or her students to take some part in the consideration.

As far as laptops are concerned, I actually don’t care whether students bring them to class or leave them at home. Again, one size doesn’t fit all: As far as I can see, it would make no sense for my students in “Turbo Greek” to have computers in front of them when we talk about the accentuation of the aorist middle imperative; but I learned this past semester in my freshman seminar on ancient Egypt that having ready access to the date of some obelisk or being able on a whim to examine screen shots from so important a cultural artifact as the movie “Stargate” could be very useful indeed. This seems obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious to me last August. Even old katz can learn new tricks.

My real beef with laptops is that I find it distracting to sit near someone who is going clickety-clack on a standard noisy keyboard while I am trying to concentrate on a lecture. But when I’m doing the lecturing myself, I’m not much bothered. If I notice that students are sending e-mail or watching YouTube while I am speaking, I may well make fun of them publicly, but it does not bother me more than if they are idly doodling in purple ink on my nice handouts or — I had the dubious pleasure of a whole semester of this in the first class I ever taught — if they are making out dead center in the third row. And believe me, all this is a whole lot better than if they are asleep.

So what about taping lectures? I was interested to learn from Brian Kernighan GS ’69’s latest column that “Harvard routinely records large lecture classes” and wonder how many courses here are officially filmed. (I also wonder what happens to these records, including after the technological apparatus required to view them becomes obsolete, something that might take a decade these days — which is four orders of magnitude less impressive than the clay tablet.) If any of my colleagues actively want their lectures recorded, that’s great; but for now, at least, I do not wish to join them, above all because I agree with every word of the on-line responses to Zakin by “Living in New Brunswick,” most particularly the statement that “knowing you’re being recorded changes how you lecture. Say goodbye to jokes, off the cuff remarks, … everything that makes a dry lecture fun.” There are people who perform well in front of a camera, but I am not one of them, as I learned the hard way many years ago when the Teaching Company came to my class on the history of English and I proceeded to give the most comically inept lecture of my career (so far).

As I’ve said, it is only a recent realization of mine that having some laptops in class can be a good thing, and I promise to keep an open mind on the taping of lectures. Perhaps a decade from now what I have just written will seem quaint. But for now, please keep your iPhones away from my jokes.

Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics, the Director of the Program in Linguistics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.