Underlife (Carefull its Tricky)

Reading over the concepts of underlife produced by Robert Brooke, I decided to take some time and reflect on different ways I used underlife as an undergrad, or even as a graduate student, to be perfectly honest. I think all of us had been guilty of underlife at some point in time during our college career. All though as we have stated in class that the technological gap between us and our students may be greater than we had anticipated, we had other methods of producing underlife. I remember working on homework during class (mostly because of the ease of doing work in class rather than later that night), and I remember several occasions where I read ahead or was working on something for class, but none the less something that wasn't relevant to the topics in class that.

With beginning our class observations this past week I came to understand the concept of underlife as much more extent than my own personal experiences. In one class I witnessed 6 students sending text messages, one checking Facebook and another sending emails while the professor was talking. While none of these activities were extremely distracting the rest of the class (at least no more distracting than when I attempted to open a Sprite quietly and had it fizz and hiss from the back of the room) they still impeded those individual students in absorbing the information being discussed.

I would even purpose that some of the "stupid" questions that we will have asked in our classrooms will be a direct result of some sort of underlife activity. Students that seem to not be paying attention when we are giving directions, but may be paying attention to something else (the usual suspects: texting, facebook, myspace, webpages). The key question becomes, how do we counter these forces at work?

We had discussed several methods of attempting to overcome underlife in class the other day, but the one observation that I could make about most of the forms of underlife I noticed is that most, if not all, of the guilty students were sitting in the back of the room, and were only performing these activities when the teacher was standing and talking at the front of the classroom. It seems obvious that the students most likely to be playing on the computer or their phones will instinctively sit as far away from the position of the teacher as possible, so standing in one spot and talking at the students instead of talking with the students seems to be the least effective method of teaching possible for several reasons. First, the teaching style is very ineffective for just generally communicating with students. Second, as I have observed, the farther away a student is from the teacher, the more likely they are to engage in some sort of underlife activity.

The goal of the English teacher should not be to eliminate underlife. Brooke himself says that underlife is an important aspect of institutional life. I think what is important for a teacher trying to promote critical thinking and allowing students to discover their identities is to curtail the amount and types of underlife that takes place in our classrooms. While it may not be a horrible aspect of underlife for a student to doodle on a handout or talk to the person sitting next to them in class about an assignment, texting and distracting activities can be detrimental to a students success in our course.