Article: “And Their Eyes Glazed Over” by Joelle Renstrom
Summary:
Professor Joelle Renstrom’s undergraduate students aren’t paying attention in class. Instead, their hands inch toward their cell phones around the 50-minute class’s 30-minute mark, and instead of engaging in chatting and playful banter immediately preceding and following class, their fingers are flying, engaged in text messages and swiping through Internet pages. As a result, she has a no-cell-phone policy within the class; violations—as in phones ringing during class—grant the class a free concert as the student must sing or dance as punishment (it’s in the syllabus). Other forms of technology are just as bad: students with laptops rarely use them to take notes or look at the class’s daily reading; instead, students are engaged in non-class online activities, such as shopping or checking social media. Even students who do take notes on their laptops miss out more than those who write notes by hand.
Distraction equals students missing out on vital information, and technology has made procrastinators out of non-procrastinators and worsened procrastination tendencies for those who already procrastinate. As Renstrom teaches classes on writing and research, she has noticed—and various researchers have shown that—what we read affects how we write. Online materials are geared toward simplistic syntax, and she has noticed the detrimental effects to her students’ grammar, word-processing, and critical-thinking skills. Even when the occasional rare student does make a breakthrough into technology’s harmful effects, that insight washes over the rest of his or her classmates who sit glassy-eyed, already zoned out and tuned back into their little worlds. While Renstrom is forced to embrace technology in the classroom for reasons she enumerates in her article, she is depressed by the detrimental effects it has on the current generation raised by the Internet.
Characters and Their Roles:
- Joelle Renstrom: protagonist
- Renstrom’s students (undergraduates at Boston University who are taking classes on writing and research): antagonists who can’t get away from their technology long enough to pay attention in class
- Studies by various researchers: used to back up her claims (unnamed but out of “So-and-so University” or “Such-and-such Institution”)
- Theorists: also used to back up her claims
- Juan Enriquez: purports that the next iteration of humans, Homo evolutis, is one that can control its own evolution
- Amber Case: cyborg anthropologist who argues that we are cyborgs already because although the technology isn’t attached to our bodies, we don’t need to be implanted to be connected and unable to function without it
- Chris: shy 19-year-old student whose phone rang in class, who busted out, as per the course syllabus policy (that students’ cell phones who ring during class either sing or dance), “Build Me Up Buttercup,” to which the whole class joined in without a cell phone in sight, finally engaging with one another