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snarkhunter
2010-01-20 01:15 am UTC (link)

it looks like you're taking notes.

It really doesn't, unless you're in a large lecture classroom.

I usually don't say anything to the students who are doing the Sudoku/crossword/whatever, but I do glare. Sometimes I glare until they look up, and then I just raise my eyebrows. It generally works.

B/c, you know, I am just talking to hear myself talk.

Then again, I'm cranky tonight, which is making me more snarky about classroom misbehavior than normal, and as an auditory learner, I had a tendency to absorb more in classes where I was occupying myself with something in my notebook (drawings, writing) while taking notes.

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funwithrage
2010-01-20 02:35 am UTC (link)

For what it's worth, I was mostly interested in the lecturers when I was in college--except for some really dull core courses (oh, EL 40 and 60: if I wanted to take a Gender Studies class, I'd have DONE THAT, and Puritan captivity narratives could be used as sleeping aids)--but my God, the discussion groups drove me batty. If the choice is between writing notes for game and listening to the opinion of someone who thinks Romeo and Juliet was "so romantic, yeah, and it was for the best that they met even though they died because otherwise they wouldn't have had their soul mates"...

...well, you can see my predicament. ;)

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snarkhunter
2010-01-20 04:08 am UTC (link)

Oh, no, I totally agree. You should see my class notes--they're part notes, part notes for stories, part letters to friends/notes to classmates, part screeds of anger, and filled with nonsensical stick figures--most of which are supposed to be sheep, b/c I like to draw sheep. Just b/c you're doodling in your notebook doesn't mean you're not listening, and I guess the same goes for Sudoku. It just seems to me (and I could be wrong) that the latter requires more concentration on something that is not the class.

B/c I went to a tiny school, our classes were small, so I never had to deal with the whole big lecture/annoying discussion group problem.

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funwithrage
2010-01-20 10:40 pm UTC (link)

Ahh, see, I went to a largish university and a rather touchy-feely one, so...well, I had four or five classes that kept me listening and taking actual notes (linguistics and critical theory, magic, Shakespeare, medieval lit) and then a bunch that...bleah. I was interested in how the story worked as a story while the professor wanted to talk about postmodernism, or the professor was interesting but we had discussion-based classes and my God do a lot of my fellow English majors suck, or whatever. So: game notes, or novel notes, or pretending to follow the conversation while actually thinking about sex.

I've never done the Sudoku/crossword thing, so I'm not sure how it compares, but all the above at least left me alert enough to listen when something interesting did come up, or to make scornful noises if anyone said something particularly stupid. (So much of my participation grades came from finding sort-of-subtle ways to call my classmates idiots. Hee.)

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