I can’t believe the lack of RESPECT students at my university have for the profs. I’m taking fourth year classes, and people are STILL blatantly texting on their phones and talking to each other when the prof is trying to lecture. I know you’re only showing up to sign the attendance sheet but seriously… some of us actually give a shit.
One of my classes for Buddhism was at the beautiful Shambhala centre, and all of the Chinese students (which makes up half the class) had the NERVE to yank out their cell phones and laptops while the prof was trying to get us to do a contemplation discussion. I seriously cannot believe this. It is extremely distracting and rude. Do us all a favour and FUCK OFF. —Why are you even here then?
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 6, 2010.
Did the Chinese occupy the Shambholic Centre and force the instructor into exile?
Oh OP I couldn’t agree with you more. There was a smartly dressed girl in one of my classes, sitting in one of the middle rows in the center once. She was clearly visible to the prof. but she chose to take off her shoes prop up her feet on the desk and pull out her cell phone and text with the phone right up to her face. I was shocked! I wanted the throw a binder at her head.
Oh p.s. it’s every race and colour doing this bullshit! I won’t pretend I don’t text from time to time but do it “undercover” and NOT FOR THE WHOLE DAMN CLASS. Also if your phone is on vibrate WE CAN STILL HEAR IT! Yeah that’s for that douche faced fucktard in the lib who kept her phone on vibrate through about 100 messages. UGHHHHHHHH
why are they there, because mac d’s isn’t hiring anymore. it amazes me, that even med students are so fucking noisy and don’t want to concentrate on what is being said. i won’t ge to any doctor under 40. because if you need surgery, can you be sure this guy wasn’t one of those that got their degree by the skin of their cash, not brains or hard work. maybe they can all be polititions when their terms are over, seems like that is the norm for them now. brainless, spineless fools, on a fools mission.
I always wondered what they did in the Shambala Centre. Now I know.
If I was a prof I would bring a cell-phone blocker to my classes. If I was president I would expel them because they obviously aren’t interested in learning.
If the mozzie’s really want to bring down the decadent satanic west they should forget about dirty bombs, suitcase nukes and cut-rate jihadi charter excursions into national landmarks. Develop a directed EMP burst weapon that will fry all cell phones, ipods, crackberries, etc. 85 % of the populace will be so traumatized and helpless it will be as easy as clubbing baby seals.
If I were the prof I’d be telling them to get out of my class. There’s no need for that behaviour. I wonder how many of these kids are paying for their own education, it makes a difference when you know the value of your money and how much a missed lecture costs.
The uni’s need the Chinese students for the $$$ and the car dealerships need them for the high end vehicles they drive. They should teach the fuckers what the hand means at the lights at Inglis and Tower Road, they have no sense when it comes to street crossings.
South End Halifax is like Shanghai.
Buddhism ….. yeah, as if there are lots of jobs out there for that. Go get a real degree.
Universities aren’t vocational schools.
People don’t have cells, smart phones, etc, they have appendages. If you took their toy away, they would be completely lost and probably commit suicide. I have never heard such panicing as when you hear “I can’t find my cell, smartphone, etc.” I don’t think they’d know how to use a pay phone and to make it funnier make it a dial pay phone.
That’s why us oldsters will have the survival edge when society finishes breaking down. We’re pragmatic, snake mean and the dirtiest fighters you ever met. The “Hardwired generation” = Zombie food.
WOLVERINES!
my sister teaches at a college in Ontario – the rule there is cell phones in class will cause you to be sent out of the room. The example she used for her class was – unless you are awaiting word of life saving transplant for yourself, or you are providing a kidney for someone else, NO cell phones or texting. Otherwise, out the door.
it’s endemic of a wired world. i am sofa king important that the world cannot survive without my twatting and facefarting for a nano-second…silence is golden and gone
fg: that works in cases where students are students. I was a single mother throughout university, and I had to have my cell on at all times in case of a daycare emergency. That said it was only ever on vibrate, and if it did go off and it was important I would leave the room to deal with the call and return once it was over. If it wasn’t important I would hit ignore to save others from the annoyance of the vibration…
I haven’t gone to university yet but I don’t really see why the things that other people are doing anyone else’s concern. When I was in highschool, people would always be texting, throwing notes, throwing objects and whispering but I didn’t stare at them and glare the whole class; I worked and listened to what the teacher was saying. These people are paying to go there too, why do you care what they do in class? And the Chinese students may have been looking things up while the teacher was talking…my Japanese friend had a little translator thing that looked like a laptop and she always had it out.
I never had the ‘pleasure’ of witnessing all this ‘connectedness’ when I was a student.
Long ago in the paleolithic age we had limited access to computers, because they occupied entire rooms and we coded onto punch cards and ran batch jobs in archaic languages like Fortran IV. The idea that people would eventually be walking around with more computing power in their backpacks than NASA used to send men to the moon was Science Fiction to us. My how times have changed!
Calculators? We did math the old fashioned way – on slide rules – at least until the first hand-held electronic calculators came out which didn’t do much more than basic arithmetic and square roots. I still have a Texas Instruments SR-11 in my desk which did only this and cost me $120 back in the early 1970s. That was BIG COIN back then. It belongs in a museum but I keep it for the memories. We learned methods in calculus to figure square roots to any desired accuracy using pencil and paper or referred to math tables, but these things gave way to electronic calculators during my university years and most of us were happy about that as calculators became more powerful.
If we needed to make a phone call during the day (it happened every once in awhile) we went to a payphone. There were lots of those around in the old days. If you had said that people would be initiating and receiving dozens of phone calls per day, whose content was mostly inconsequential, we would have laughed at the incredible waste of another Science Fiction technology. Surely there would be more important uses for this relatively instantaneous method of communication. Sadly, not as many as we once thought.
We did our research in something called a library – no World Wide Web back then. It had endless stacks of things like books and journals. It was time consuming, but you could be fairly certain that if Prof. Wiesenheimer et al had managed to get their paper published in Annalen der Physik they probably weren’t quacks who had given themselves fancy titles and phony institute affiliations to bolster their web presence.
Oh, and if you interrupted a prof during class by chatting with your friends, you would have been unceremoniously tossed out on your ear.
This will all sound archaic to today’s students and perhaps it is, but we embraced it for the most part and felt like we knew something about the world when we graduated.
Thank you all for allowing me this stroll down memory lane.
Now I think I need a diaper change and my daily meds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVx2MDoyLYQ…
that was awesome donkey
“I don’t really see why the things that other people are doing anyone else’s concern.”
Because it distracts the teacher and other students.
High school isn’t university, although the line is becoming blurrier everyday.
LOL Donkey.
It’s called survival of the fittest people. Entitled, wealthy folks and their stepford children are on the way out, let them go! Here’s the hook. YOU need to get class early as possible and sit front and centre. Let the mindless, stoopid a-holes sit behind you. Make eye contact with your prof. He/she will love you for it. And ps, these ‘zombie foods’ get away with it because their parents call the prof and threaten to sue when their illiterate useless kid gets a c. It’s truly unbelieveable. BUT that’s what you get when you treat EDUCATION as a PRODUCT as we have as a society over the past 10 years or so. –EX TA who loves the learner
Donkey, we need more teachers like that.
Wow, not blatantly racist or anything. People like you are why racism exists today.What does them being Asian have to do with ANYTHING…? Idiot. I hope whatever is bothering you about people on their “laptops” (notes, anyone?) persists. We don’t live in medeival times…get a life and bitch to your other tree hugging friends about your childish woes.
As the current Chair in philosophy/pedagogy on this site, I feel it incumbent upon me to pronounce on the issue of the use of cell-phones and texting during class. As I see it, the conflict is the perrenial one of contemporary social mores in conflict advanced technology.
In a recent (but unposted) Bitch appropriately entitled “Darwin Refuted,” I claimed that there existed a lag between the content of the Bitches that were posted as revealed by the minds of those doing the posting on the one hand, and the advanced technology which permitted them to do so, on the other. Darwin, you will recall, maintained that all species not only survived (if they did) but progressed through a process of “natural selection,” one in which the aged, the sick, and the unfit “fell by the wayside” thereby paving the way for the flourishing of its more robust members.
Using the snot-eating girl on the bus, the guy with his penis trailing in the toilet water while he defecated on it, and the breathless exchange in respect to establishing a sex chat line, I maintained that Darwin’s theory had, in effect, been refuted. Clearly, if the Bitchers and Commenters are to be taken as paradigmatic, our species has not only not evolved but in fact has regressed.
Well, so much for the philosophical background. What about the pedagogy? What is to be done, for example, with the girl in the front seat of the class texting away and ignoring the professor directly in front of her?
The pedagogy here is simple: She should have her panties pulled down and be given a good spanking.
Cheerio!
try listening to the pogues monsieur…they can brighten the darkest days^^
I remember having discussions many years ago about the impact of technology on human evolution.
Did having big brains (for some other purpose) allow us to become tool users or did using tools give us big brains? I think this question remains unresolved.
Human use of technology has clearly enabled humans to move into environments that we would otherwise not be equipped to occupy. Would the further evolution of our species be reduced or eliminated by our ability to eliminate or sidestep environmental measures of fitness?
Medical technology has given humans the ability to eliminate or significantly reduce the impact of illness and disease. Would this mean that, over time, the human gene pool would become less fit due to the accumulation of phenotypes that would have been eliminated during the earlier stages of our species’ evolution?
What we did not fully appreciate at the time was the extent to which obvious technological solutions to what we thought were simple problems frequently bring with them other problems to which there are no obvious technological solutions.
The question of whether technology has insulated humanity from evolutionary pressures I think now has an answer. Clearly, our species is not protected in this way by our technology. As an unintended side effect of our technological development, we are remaking the climate of this planet on a vast scale. The global climate has been launched on a altered trajectory by human activity and may soon pass a transition or tipping point the leads to a new global normal that won’t support the current human population. Worse yet, feedback mechanisms may be triggered which will drive the earth’s climate into a ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect, thereby leading to the extinction of most species on this planet including us.
Something else that doesn’t receive much interest from the average citizen is the extent to which the world’s population relies on petroleum to feed itself. Fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are all derived from petroleum products and their use to ‘temporarily’ increase yields has allowed the population of the planet to balloon to almost 7 billion. The removal of these inputs from agriculture, as petroleum grows more scarce, will mean the eventual die off of much of the world’s population. Some ecologists estimate the ‘natural’ carrying capacity of the planet to be less than 2 billion. There are no technological solutions to this pressing problem.
Finally, our methods of social organization have almost guaranteed that we would end up in this fix. It is fairly obvious by now that none of the dominant political systems that humans have developed contain within them any mechanism for preserving the long term sustainability of the very societies in which they are embedded.
In the end, from an ecological point of view, we are not so different from a bacterial colony in a test tube. We have experienced a population explosion based on a limited endowment of resources, which as a side effect has altered the environment in which our species evolved, and we can’t escape the test tube. Our population will crash, taking with it most of what we refer to as our global civilization.
Technology has not made us immune to evolutionary pressures at all. On the contrary, from its earliest developmental stages, technology has contained within it the seeds of our eventual demise as the dominant species on this planet. I don’t know if this outcome was inevitable. We are currently the only example in the universe from which to draw conclusions. Insufficient data, as Spock would say.
In any case, those questions about technology and evolution have been answered. Darwin is alive and well.
On a lighter note, I do believe that corporal punishment is the correct response in some circumstances, and I think I would be up to the challenge of delivering a spanking to this wayward, cellphone addicted coed.
As the Chair of the Philosophy & Pedagogy Department on this site I would like to propose a vote of thanks to Commandante Eposito for his thoughtful remarks on the relationship between the evolution of the species on the one hand, and on the other the current revolutionary progress in technology. Unsuprisingly, in view of my position indicated above, not only do I entirely endorse the Commandante’s views but I have taken an even stronger stance, i.e., that there is an entire disconnect between the two, that technological progress not only does not necessarily entail any meaningful evolution of the species but, while undeniably contributing to the material betterment of our lot, has also contributed substantially to its degradation.
I will not rehearse the Commandante’s points – there is no need since he has done that both exhaustively and eloquently – but rather ask the obvious next question. What’s next? Is a total “Untergang” of our species unavoidable? Is extinction in the cards?
The impression I have gotten – I could be wrong but it is extremely unlikely since I am rarely wrong about things generally – is that if the downward spiral the Commandante depicts is to be avoided, salvation will come not so much from technological advances but rather from a radically altered view of life’s purpose. I get the sense that the Commandante, clearly a devotee of technology, at least initially, has glimpsed its limits and is facing what might best be described as a “philosophical vacuum.”
I am not a Luddite nor am I “born again,” but I do think – believe? – that our lives are more than simply “sound and fury signifying nothing.” I think that the purpose of life, in the final analysis, is the sustained and structured attempt to discover (“construct?”) that purpose. What what does that involve? It involves philosophy, just the sort of thing the Commandante and I have been engaging in.
So thank you once again, Commandante, for your thoughts. I detect a slight but unmistakably fresh and invigorating breeze blowing through the foetid confines of “Bitch.”
Cheerio!
Why are we even talking about the impact of technology in society? I’m not sure but the last time I checked, technology has no direct impact on ” COMMON FUCKING COURTESY “. You are not at university to text with your ( probably just as ignorant ) friends, you are there to learn… period. If people can turn off there cell phones to watch a movie, certainly they can manage to turn them off while attending a university class to better themselves and get an education. Fuck…what the hell is wrong with people?
OK, haligirl818, you’re right: it *is* blatantly racist to tar *all* Chinese with that brush. But speaking of racism, you might want to do some research on Chinese attitudes towards non-Chinese…it’s not very complimentary.
Inexcusably, while in full philosophical throat, I omitted to note that the Commendante had volunteered to pull down the coed texter’s panties and give her a good spanking. Is there no limit to this man’s dedication to public service?
If you falter Commendante – and what upstanding citizen would not given such a daunting task – rest assured that I will stand by and do my duty! Is there no limit to her cheek?
As a connoisseur of female buttocks – good cleavage with perhaps an enticing glimpse of plump labia – I shoulder the burden with a sense of civic responsibility!
Thank you once again, Commendante!
Cheerio!
I had a prof at smu that would ask you to leave if you were texting during class or even using your laptop to msn or use FB during class. I thought it was a great idea.
When I was at acadia in the early 2000s, it was the same things with the laptops. People would bring them to class and fuck around on the network/internet rather than pay attention, so A LOT of profs started banning “the network” in class. These were the days before WiFi so you had to connect with a cord and they’d just say “no network cords in class.” It was SAD it had to come to that and after that rule was put in place a lot more people stopped bringing their computers to class.
Problem these days though, is that pay phones are not being installed, are being taken out, actually and are not being maintained. It’s REALLY tough finding one these days. When I was in quebec, my rez phone didn’t allow you to make collect calls, and my cell was being a bastard and wouldn’t let me call long distance or make a collect call for some stupid reason, and I had to locate a pay phone because it was late so i couldn’t get a LD card to use with the rez phone. I walked all over that fucking campus and ended up having to walk to the student centre on the other side of campus at 1am just to call my mom (and yes, I could’ve skyped, but the university’s ITT place wasn’t open on weekends to get internet — which was a huge clusterfuck of annoyance even when they WERE open).
So THAT’S the problem with payphones these days, really. There aren’t enough of them. Dont’ got no cell? you’re fk’d in most cases.
Realist in Dartmouth: WTF? So you’re basically saying its cool to hate on chinese people because their views on non-chinese are “non-complimentary”–according to YOU (I didn’t bother googling it, better ways to waste my time than to justify hating on a race because you think they hate you)
and I’m not even going to comment on how sad it is that you people still think an Asian person is Chinese…
Idiots.
When you go to SMU you get used to being around A LOT of Asians. At first I’d notice the shear numbers of Asian students, but after two years there, I really didn’t notice any more.
I always worked in group project with Asian students and they were all pretty cool *shrug*
If an Asian person is not Chinese then what are they; Indian or Japanese?