How Inattention Disrupts Active Listening: The Price Students Pay Why should anyone care about my growing displeasure in the classroom?
Isn’t this my problem — one that mirrors the problems of old people over the centuries who must learn to adjust to new technology and social norms? Perhaps it is. But that raises the question whether this particular technology and these social norms have a place in the classroom. Students apparently believed that they were learning as much as they needed to learn, even as they attended to several other tasks at the same time. But they were mistaken. I have never liked talking with people who are multi-tasking. The typical line when a person objects to the multi-tasking interlocutor – and I have used this line myself – is to say “I’m listening. What I’m doing doesn’t take any thought. Go ahead and say what you were going to say.” I have offered this assurance in the past, when addressing envelopes or folding laundry while talking, and I believed it to be true at the time, but I am dubious now. If I give my undivided attention to the person who is talking to me, I am much more likely to
