Crisp: Texting is enemy in college classes

John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, and writes for the Scripps Howard News Service.

One of the things that college teachers do during the luxurious lull between the end of the fall semester and the beginning of the spring is to think about what to do differently when the new faces show up in their classrooms in January.

And I've been thinking about . . . cell phones. They're a much bigger presence in the college classroom than one might have imagined even just a few years ago. Left to their own devices, students would use them in classrooms just as they do elsewhere - that is, incessantly.

A few college teachers, overwhelmed by the inevitable, allow their students to text freely on their cell phones during class. After all, according to a survey released last spring by the consumer electronics shopping and review site Retrevo, 10 percent of college-age students think it's OK to text during sex. What chance is there of curbing the urge to connect during, say, a discussion of Beowulf? Still, I suspect that most college teachers resist, maintaining that some circumstances still call for the kind of focused attention that excludes outside connections, if only briefly.

This is a hard sell with students. Most of them would be justifiably disconcerted if their professor took a call during class, but it's hard for them to imagine disconnection from their own electronic world for as long as an hour. In fact, many of them can't tolerate it at all. Even in classes like mine, where we agree at the beginning of the semester to forswear our cell phones for two short class periods per week, texting is irresistible.

My college-age nieces assure me that a good texter can rest her hand inconspicuously within her purse and send one-handed texts to any number of friends without betraying the slightest sign of diverted attention. Most classroom texters aren't that adept, however, and texting is often obvious. In fact, it's so habitual and commonplace among students that many neglect to conceal it at all.

The struggle to achieve and maintain students' attention to ideas that will never be as interesting, immediate and seemingly relevant as those that emerge from an electronic device has reached a crisis.

As an old-fashioned liberal, naturally I turn to Washington for help. None is forthcoming. In fact, the new House of Representatives, which convenes this month, recently made rule changes that permit previously forbidden cell phones and personal computers on the House floor. If the representatives that we elect to deal with the weightiest matters of governance are able to consult their iPods and BlackBerrys in the midst of their deliberations, who am I to bar their use in my humble classroom?

Still, I think I'll try - at least for another semester or two. Despite the systematic shortening of our national attention span (both individual and collective) colleges, conservative by nature, continue to ask students to do things - reading and writing, for example - that call for focused attention and concentration.

Distraction is the mortal enemy of the kind of extended linear thinking that underpins good reading and writing. Today's students are as smart as ever, but many of them aren't great readers and writers, partly because they haven't practiced these skills very much. Furthermore, they have an abundance of other ways of getting information and expressing themselves that have nothing to do with traditional linear text.

Our culture no longer encourages undistracted focus on a single idea for a prolonged period of time - more than, say, the length of a commercial. Perhaps a college classroom could be one of those rare venues where, freed from the myth of multi-tasking, students experience an uncommon encounter with depth and extended time that is nearly unheard of in everything else they do.

It couldn't hurt to try it.