Lecture and egotism

I was doing guest lecture / Q&A in a science communication course at Cornell, where I was a professor at large last week. A friend of mine was in the back of the room, and later told me: “A bunch of students were on their laptops, but only about half of them were looking at Instagram and the other half were looking at information about you and your books!”

He meant this to be a complement but my initial reaction was — what? Students were looking at their laptops while we were talking? I had no idea. In my mental construction of the event, both while it was happening and afterwards, every eye in the room was on me.

And this made me reflect — when I am giving a talk, or even a classroom lecture, I’m inclined to always think I’m being listened to. But of course that’s not true! It couldn’t be true!

There are limits, of course. If I’m lecturing and I’ve lost the whole room, I see their eyes die and I notice it. I stop and regroup and change course. But if half the kids are tuned out? I’m just gonna be honest, I probably don’t notice that.

Now you can read this as saying I’m a huge egotist who relies on unrealistic assessments of how interesting I’m being, and thanks to this reliance am failing to engage the class. Or you could say it’s very, very hard to teach class in such a way that there’s not some notable proportion of students tuned out at any given moment, and that it would be even harder to teach class well if you were constantly aware of which students those were. And as a counterpoint to that sympathetic assessment, you could say it’s not a random and constantly shifting sample of students who are tuned out; there might be a notable proportion who are almost tuned out and who I’m allowing myself to fail, or rather to not even try, to reach.

I don’t really know!