…ROTFL, Omg g2g I’m tot L8 4 class!If one understood the previous line, please put down the cell phone and listen up.
Many students and professors on our campus consider texting in class to be bothersome and ill-mannered. Also, it can get students thrown out of a class if done repeatedly after a professor’s warning.
The student code of conduct at West Chester includes a provision against engaging in conduct that unnecessarily disturbs others. This includes conduct through electronic means. The punishment for such an offense is left to the professor’s discretion and can lead to removal from the class roster.
Texting in class might even get you arrested for disorderly conduct, as it did for a young lady in Wisconsin last year. So, why do some students continue poking buttons under their desk during class?
A second-year student with an English major, responded to this query. Her retort was that she feels out of touch when her phone is out of reach. She said that she needs it on so that she won’t miss a call, and that she pays tuition which she thinks has an appended right to text if she feels it’s necessary.
Charles Bauerlein of the journalism department disagrees. “Students should not have the expectation that just because they pay tuition means they have a right to maintain constant contact with their friends,” Bauerlein said.
The English major also said that she doesn’t think her texting is wrong as long as she doesn’t bother anyone else. She said this is not the case because her phone is always set to silent. However, even if a phone is set to silent, fellow students sitting near still a person texting can still hear the clicking sound of fingers rapidly pressing buttons.
“When I hear that sound I just want to grab their phone and throw it out the window. It’s a disservice to both the professor, and the students,” Nicole Landon said, a graduate student.
Art student Becca Lee said, “It doesn’t really bother me, if they don’t want to learn that’s their issue.” Paul Maltby of the English department said that he catches a student texting in class roughly six times a week, and that it is, “Discourteous to the professor, and distracts other students.”
The conflict continues.
However, the problems related to the medium of texting are not solely annoyance. A study conducted by University of Florida researchers revealed a correlation between compulsive text messaging and anxiety. The investigators enrolled 183 individuals, 36 percent of them students. They found that self-reported anxiety significantly correlated with cell-phone dependence scores and cell-phone abuse scores.
At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, studies are showing that students’ language proficiency is on the decline and that texting is one of the contributing causes. Emoticons, smiley faces, and the term “cuz” are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, professors and administrators at Simon Fraser said.
“The words ‘a lot’ have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell,” says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.
Joel Postman, author of “SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate,” says that he thinks it’s quite possible that cell phone texting and social networking are contributing to the corruption of students’ writing skills.
Perhaps in class texting can be reconciled in a positive way if students and professors work together with their minds open. Or perhaps, it’s just another bad habit that college students will have to do less or professors are going to have to get used to.
Joshua Vaughan is a student attending West Chester University.