Gangsta teachers need respect: On a pedagogic power play

Teachers and presenters are prone to rail against a great societal wrong: The accidental ringing of mobile phones during presentations. They do it so ofte, it has become a cliche. And as it is so often with cliches, this one is very commonly used to establish power so it is useful to take have a bit of fun with it. Here’s one expression of it, I noted some years ago. The author is not my target so their identity is not important. Let’s call them GK.

I hate cellphone interruptions more than almost any lecture-interrupting event not involving gunplay. Our students seem not to realize (though our colleagues surely should) that explaining complex material to an assembly of strangers within a time limit is stressful. It’s harder than those who have never done it would think. Trying to get back on track after being blindsided by a disturbance can cost you as much as a minute — perhaps 3 to 5 percent of the time you have for a conference paper (and 2 percent even in a 50-minute class).

But as a reader, taking the role of a lecture attendee, I would like to say “I don’t care”! I’ve done my fair share of lecturing and paper giving and I’ve also attended a fair share of lectures. All I can say is that more often than not I welcome an interruption to wake me up from my stupor (in either role). What GK seems not to realize that only the most engaging of presenters on only the most engaging of subjects are actually explaining something. Most of lecture attendees are only getting snippets of the content anyway and to blame any interruption (short of cancelling the event) is just too self-centred. Sure, presenting is stressful for many people but it is no more stressful than serving meals at a restaurant or working in a call center — both cases expose the person in question to the vagaries of human communicative diversity. But people who make their living lecturing are generally far more amply compensated both fiscally and symbolically that I think they should be able to get over themselves.

Presenting a lecture has always been an enterprise fraught with interruption: a drill or a siren going on outside, somebody coming in late or just opening the door for an instant to realize they have the wrong room, somebody sneezing at the wrong moment, somebody dropping a pen, somebody leaving early, somebody raising a hand to ask a stupid question. Sometimes it relieves the boredom, sometimes it breaks somebody’s concentration or their train of thought. Such are the facts of life when you deliver or attend lectures. An accidentally ringing mobile phone is no better or worse than any of the others. It’s just a new safe thing to grumble about. And (if my lecturing experience is anything to go by) it happens extremely rarely. Today, you’d expect to be interrupted every few minutes in a lecture hall of any size but it only happens once in a while. Which means most people either silence their phones or don’t get that many calls.

I come in the latter category which is why my phone started ringing just the other day while I was actually delivering a presentation. I turned it off and that was that. Was it an interruption? Yes. Did anybody come to me afterwards and say: “You know this phone business really ruined it for me?” No. People asked questions about the content of the presentation. Some really got it. Others clearly didn’t. Interruptions played no role.

Explaining something to “an audience of strangers” is hard and it can never achieve perfect results. 5 more or less percent of time is never the thing that makes the difference. I was recently asked to do a 30-minute keynote but then had to shorten it to 10 minutes because the preceding speakers ran over. So I skipped to the conclusions and got on with it. Not like people really expect to hear things in keynotes they didn’t know already. A few people actually came up to me afterwards to commiserate that this wasn’t fair to me but not a single one regretted not learning more or asked me for an elaboration (but maybe that was just me).

The thing lecturers (at all levels) need to realize that people attending their lectures are part of the rest of the human existence which involves occasionally forgetting to turn off your phone before a lecture (or being unable to because of possible emergencies — I frequently have female students asking for permission to keep their phone on because of childcare commitments). It just so happened that GK (by their own admission) also had their phone on during the incident that inspired the rant and used this opportunity to turn it off. So I don’t understand what they’re talking about. It’s not like people are trying to purposely interrupt presenters. They forget, the phone rings, and they feel bad about it. Why should we require any higher standards of consideration of lecture attendees than of lecturers? What about lecturers who deliver stupefyingly boring presentations, or just go over what everybody knows, or (a sport popular at academic conferences) don’t deliver anything that is promised by the title or abstract. They don’t just waste minutes of everybody’s time, they waste hours or entire semesters. Compared to that a ringing phone is nothing.

I hate it when teachers demand respect. It’s almost as bad as teachers hectoring for “adult” or “mature” behavior. All this is doing is entrenching an already unequal relationship between the presenter and presentees. Symbolically, the presenter has all the power. Everybody is looking at them, they control who speaks and what gets said. They can draw on an implicit position of authority reinforced by the physical configuration of the room and the symbolic configuration of the situation. And propagating cliches about how awful interruptions are is just part of promulgating this unequal relationship. The audiences have much less power. In extreme circumstances, they can walk out or boo. They can grumble in the corridor, pass notes, or nowadays they can tweet. But their most commonly used power is inattention or restlessness. That can be just as distracting to a presenter as if all their phones rang simultaneously.

But what I most hate about this is the lack of acknowledgement of the equality of humanity. There are indeed certain logistical demands of delivering content via the lecture format. One person is speaking to many people. Some of those people depend on the information (for many reasons) so interfering with the audio channel by one person in the group monopolizes the mode of transmission. So rules exist to encourage behavior that leaves the shared channel undisturbed. It could be by agreement of good manners or by explicit request by the lecturer or the impresario to desist from certain modes of expression. In concerts and operas they often even tell you when not to applaud and in churches when to sing along. But in any group of people, it is likely that there will be someone who doesn’t “get the message” or simply doesn’t have the social grace to go along. But that’s just what dealing with humans is all about. Some of them just don’t get the message — but is that necessarily a justification for abuse “What the hell is wrong with you morons — your phones are so smart yet you’re all so dumb” or violence: http://www.sodahead.com/fun/teachers-smashing-cell-phones-lol/question-1431591? How many teachers lecture hung-over, ill prepared, distracted, tired of disaffected? They would be the first to demand understanding of their circumstance. They should also give out understanding in equal measure. They deal with people. People mess up.

It is true, lecturers and teachers sometimes have reason to fear their audiences. Deep down they know that their authority is paper-thin. It only takes one person to successfully break the power balance, and the floodgates to social chaos in the classroom will open. Maybe attendees will actually start answering their phone calls as well as just letting phones ring out. But in most contexts, the occasionally forgotten muting of a cell phone is just one of those things that happen. It’s not a personal insult to the teacher or a display of a massive moral failing on the part of the offender. And most importantly complaining about it is not a sign of wit or wisdom. It is just a safe conversational gesture in the power play that is the teacher-teachee relationship.