Thank you for your post! This generation of undergraduate students are particularly unique because they are attached to their cellphones and laptops all the time. They (& others after them) are being brought up in a time in which personal interaction and face-to-face conversation is becoming less and less “normal”. I agree to an extent with the point that you mention of technology being more of a distraction in the classroom than a help. I think professors just need to find a way to properly utilize it more with their students. While I personally think technology can be a help, I also agree that students should engage with each other in the classroom. Especially now a days since graduate school is becoming a requirement for many students and they won’t know how to function and engage in critical thinking and learning.

I agree with you. I think many teachers today attempt to substitute them actually teaching with classroom however I believe there are ways that integrating technology to reinforce a point you are attempting to make makes much more sense. I think teachers and professors should be prepared to appropriately use and integrate technology in the classroom when necessary not simply because they’re feeling lazy.

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Heather,

Thank you for your post! I completely agree with your thought process and argument in your post. Much of what you’re saying regarding k12 and undergraduate education is my (unfortunate) lived experience. It wasn’t until graduate school that I was challenged to think critically and for myself. That I was allowed to draw conclusions for myself and challenge the words of my teachers/professors and that of the authors.

I don’t know if there is a concrete course of action to your question but I think that one way to engage students at all levels of education is to remove standardized testing and allow students the option to explore their own learning. Of course there are course of objectives and benchmarks that all classes must meet but it should be up to the teacher AND the student on how they get there. Teachers should be allowed to remove the standard and exercise creative freedom in using tactics/methods that engage students in a way that’s meaningful to them. When I was a preschool educator, my school moved from concrete curriculum to the Reggio Emilia Philosophy. I initially hated this because the children were allowed to discover and learn in the classroom what they wanted to and I was forced to come up wit lessons on the fly. However after several years, I noticed my kids were still learning the material that I wanted them to learn (ABC’s, numbers in English, Spanish and Hebrew, etc.) even though I wasn’t teaching the “conventional” way.

Luisa,
I’ll be completely honest and say that I had the same thoughts when I read this article. I agree with you whole-heartedly. As someone who had to overcome many struggles to attend & fund my entire collegiate education on top of other mounting responsibilities, I can’t stand when I see statements that essentially say even rich kids drop out of school. In my experience, many of those students do have alternative plans or do not need to college and so therefore the idea is not forced on them to finish. But for the author to compare privileged students to non-privilege students is wrong. There are separate circumstances that cause the same outcome, however for those that aren’t as privileged, I truly don’t believe that they all leave of their own free will.