There seems to be a tendency when teaching new technologies to slip into simply teaching the tools. When I’m gearing up to assign my students a multimodal project, rather than teaching students to puzzle over and feel out new technologies, I often—with the semester slipping by—take their hands and rush them through some piece of software.

Most teachers who allow laptops in the classroom regret their choice shortly afterwards.  Though students are always initially thankful and attentive, soon their eyes begin to wander to the screen.  At first they play little games.  Maybe they can have both MSWord and Wikipedia open at the same time, but maybe teacher will notice all that clicking and dragging so the reorganization goes unfinished and their browser sits blank, right next to whatever notes they are trying to compose.  It’s not long before they start wondering if you will notice them.&nbs

For whatever reason, perhaps due to my own misjudgment, many of my students are becoming increasingly – and overwhelmingly – sick right before their papers are due (some multiple times already this semester). This of course means that instead of spending valuable time preparing lessons or working on my own research, I am spending far too much time emailing back and forth with the student, creating new deadlines, and worrying whether to ask for doctor's notes. And if I ask for a note, do I ask only in the suspicious cases?

This semester, I have taken great pleasure in teaching The Rhetoric of Celebrity to a group of enthusiastic and talented students.  In my office hours a few weeks ago, a student who came in to discuss a recent assignment with me began our conversation by asking if “all rhetoric teachers had to be so young.”  

“Well,” I answered, “most of us are graduate students, so we don’t have our PhDs yet.  We’re generally in our twenties and thirties.”  

I’ve never been able to hold a silence in class. There’s lots of talk about how long you can let a question hang in the air--there’s a swagger in these discussions, a sort of teacherly way of one-upping one another. And I’ve heard boasts about a minute or two and stories about those rare masters that can hold the three, four, five minute silence (we can, in this regard, look toward John Cage as having raised the long silence to an artform).