Negative feedback

With few exceptions, the use of laptops is deemed customary — even a right — in lecture, while openly displaying alternative sources of distraction, like an actual newspaper, brush and easel or a board game, would probably engender indignation from both fellow students and professors. In my experience, admitting to others the terrible deed of not concealing that I multitask from the professor usually ends in accusations of something akin to social treason — for which a barefoot walk to the Canossa of the lectern tainted by my misdemeanor might be the least I could do to redeem myself. However, I feel no regret.

On the one hand, it is not clear why the professor should be negatively affected by, or even care about, knowing that some moments of his or her lecture do not pass Gregor Schubert’s — or any other individual’s — cost-benefit test for undivided attention. After all, every person has his or her individual learning style and it does not seem particularly scandalous to display openly this diversity of cognitive needs. In the same way that openly carrying my lunch choice of sushi past “Pizza and Pasta” in Frist Campus Center should not be particularly offensive to the pizza bakers, a non-consumption of a (paid-for) lecture should not need to be shrouded in secrecy, as long as other listeners are not disturbed.

In fact, I don’t recall ever promising to pretend to find everything a professor says spellbinding. Conversely, professors are not obliged to find everything I write in a paper or exam worthy of the highest grade. Seems fair to me.

A common objection is that to flout social convention in this manner is a sign of disregard for the lecturer’s expertise and thus disrespectful. However, this accusation lacks an understanding of the menu of choices available to a student: When I was reading the ‘Prince’ in ECO 101: Introduction to Macroeconomics my freshman year, I always had the choice of not attending lecture at all and many other students did take advantage of this option. Consequently, when a busy student chooses to attend lecture rather than do something else, he or she reveals an appreciation of the instructor that exceeds that of anyone in the class not attending lecture and the interest of most students who never signed up for the class in the first place. Strangely enough, neither one of these groups’ behavior is considered objectionable. However, this double standard is hardly due to a lack of awareness on the lecturer’s side, as it would be naive to suggest that a professor wouldn’t notice if there is a large discrepancy between the number of people registered and those attending his class.

Going out on a limb, I think younger lecturers might actually profit from the kind of immediate visible feedback on their teaching that openly displayed student distraction might provide. In addition to the rough scoring of their overall teaching quality on a scale from one to five at the end of the semester, they would obtain detailed information about their success in the competition for students’ engagement in a specific lecture. Displaying newspapers seems a particularly effective tool for this, because it lowers the social barriers and inhibitions that keep students from individually commenting upon the quality of the lectures — if viewer numbers can guide TV-programming decisions, why not use the same democratic tool of noting audience preferences in gauging the impact of a teaching method?

Far from a sign of disrespect, this kind of nuanced response to someone else’s performance would also be refreshing in other spheres of public life. For instance, excellence will be hard to attain as long as audience members at student performances in theater or dance are expected to pretend to have liked the show — even if constructive criticism is needed. I, for one, would have appreciated someone, at least once, telling me when they didn’t like my acting, so I could go home and try to improve! If it is a column, a final exam or a lecture, Princeton could use a little more awareness that even negative feedback is better than none.

Gregor Schubert is an economics major from Leipzig, Germany. He can be reached at gregors@princeton.edu.