tools, jobs

Justin Neuman:

At the start of a session, I might pull a trick from my meditation or yoga practice and say, as we’re opening our computers, that I know how tempting it is to check our carts, our socials, our text messages. I feel the pull, too. But for the next ninety minutes, we’re scrubbing in [like surgeons preparing for surgery]. Laptops are for notes and the text. Phones are face down. If your attention drifts, notice it. Bring yourself back. The drift isn’t failure. Noticing it is the lesson, and it’s what experts do.

My opening comments matter because they reframe distraction not as transgression but as training. Students begin to understand that governing their own attention is part of their education, not a prerequisite for it. I can see it in the room in little ways: in the phone turned over, deliberately, on the table; in the student’s instinct to shut the laptop immediately after we’ve searched up some supporting fact; in the occasional guilty grin of acknowledgment.

What I’m wondering is how Neuman assesses the usefulness of this strategy. Does he have any idea how many of his students text or watch TikToks or get ChatGPT to answer his questions during the 90 minutes of class, and how often they do so? I don’t see how he could know, but student behavior makes a difference, doesn’t it?

He frames the opening of class as a kind of intellectual “scrubbing in,” but do the students buy that account? Do they see it as a worthwhile discipline or just another annoying thing a prof asks them to do? And even if they do buy it and want to practice accordingly, how well do they maintain that discipline? Sure, the occasional break in concentration could be a teachable moment, but what if concentration is rarely or never achieved?

My guess — and it is of course only a guess, though one based on a great deal of careful observation — is that almost 100% of his students do something other than look at “notes and the text” during the class. I would also guess that the average student performs that looking-at-something-else every two or three minutes during the class, and that a good many students never have only the text and notes before them.

If my guesses are anywhere in the ballpark, then Neuman may not be using the proper tools for the job. But then again, that may depend on what he thinks the job is.

Later in the essay he writes,

I want students to distinguish between designing a prompt to generate a research archive and outsourcing an argument to AI. To feel the difference between generating a draft and thinking through a problem. This doesn’t require surveillance software or anti-AI pledges. It requires teaching students to ask: Why am I using this tool? What is the goal of this assignment? Where are the stakes?

As far as I can tell, students already understand perfectly well the difference between “designing a prompt to generate a research archive and outsourcing an argument to AI” — they’re bright, and the distinction isn’t a difficult one — but when given the chance most of them choose the latter because it means they spend less time working and thus can spend more time doing things they’d rather do.

Sure, learning to think through a problem would be a good thing, but there are many other good things, for instance, binge-watching Severance. Why not do the more enjoyable one? Students are, after all, like the rest of us, rational utility maximizers, and there is utility in doing what you enjoy. Especially when you tell yourself that you’re under a tremendous amount of pressure and really need the break; and that you’ll always have chatbots ready to hand if asked to do a difficult intellectual job in the future.

Neuman’s goals for his students are wholly admirable, but it seems to me that his methods are ill-suited to the motives, preferences, and temptations of actual human beings.

In my classes students look at books, notebooks, printouts, whiteboard commentary, one another, and me, because those are pretty much the only options available. (The walls in our recently renovated building are featureless.) This is not about “banning AI” but rather acknowledging that learning to read and write and think with pen and paper, and without screens and an internet connection, is valuable; and would be valuable even if we didn’t know that reading on paper is associated with superior comprehension. But we do know that: it’s been demonstrated in study after study after study.

Attentive reading is difficult in the best of circumstances, so why make things harder by subjecting people to a massively distracting environment? I just don’t get it. The right tools for the job, I say, and my job, as I understand it, is to help my students become better readers and better thinkers about what they read. If you define your job differently you might use other tools, I guess.

I’m looking at what I’ve written here and wondering whether it’s worth posting. I don’t want to be overly critical; all of us in this line of work have a rugged row to hoe, and we all struggle to find a path that works for us and our students. Maybe I should merely say that if I had to teach the way Neuman does I’d quit tomorrow and see if I could get a job as a Wal-Mart greeter. But just in case there’s something more than mere preference at work in this piece I’m gonna put it up.