Since August 1 (a month into summer holidays and over a month before school starts) we have been seeing and hearing that phrase. Back to School sale. How to wean children off holidays and get them back into school mode. How to help them adjust to earlier bed times. How to pack healthy lunches. The list goes on and on. Over the course of the month, the intensity of that kind of talk has been building, until it reached a frenzy. Last week you couldn’t turn on the TV without some advertiser, some newscaster, even the weather forecaster, talking about Back to School.
Of course politicians had to do their share in order to muddy the discussion even more. Fear mongering about a possible labour dispute among teachers. Mandatory math tests for teachers. Sex education curriculum (and yes, that one is more about politics than the needs of children). And finally, in the last days before school, out comes that old chestnut about the ban of cell phones in the classroom, ensuring more heated debate by students and teachers on both sides of the issue. 
Normally I just ignore all that hot air. But on August 7 an article on the front page of our local newspaper The Waterloo Region RECORD really caught my ire. Under the headline Are You Entertained Enough? the article reports about a University of Waterloo study that “finds students expect lecturers to be more interesting so they don’t get distracted by tech [nology] during class“. The article makes the astounding statement “while students felt that it is their choice to use the technology, they saw it as the instructors’ responsibility to motivate them not to use it”. Now that is an interesting twist! Its another way of saying, “I have a right to do this, but it is your fault if I do”. It is blame shifting clear and simple. It is always someone else’s fault. And of course we all do that on so many different levels in life. But I will stay with this one issue for today.
As I passed through the various levels of education, beginning in grade school, technology was always in use according to the extent that it was available at the time. I remember how happy we were as kids when the teacher took us either to the auditorium or some other darkened room to watch a “film” as it was then called (not a movie). Then came the “film strip”, which was much like coloured slides – images that were projected to a screen. A recording provided audio commentary with a beep sound to alert the teacher to go to the next frame. Then came educational television, produced by the Ontario government. We viewed these programs (black and white at first) on TV monitors that sat on wheeled stands that were tall enough so that the entire class could see the program.
I remember in Jr. High (called senior public in our part of the country) when the overhead projector came out. Some teachers were skeptical, and others embraced it with a vengeance and literally stopped using the blackboard (or green board. White boards came later).
And when I went to seminary, preaching class included having to preach practice sermons in class. These sermons were recorded on video tape, which was then re-played for analysis by the teacher and by your peers. The more often the instructor hit the pause button to make comments, the worse your sermon was. And then came the general use of computers and programs like PowerPoint, which today are used extensively by university professors and teachers alike.
In the church, we moved along using all of the above, though in most cases lagging just a bit behind. I remember the days when missionary slides could be shown in the sanctuary, but movies were relegated to the church basement. I have used powerpoint for preaching for a number of years, taking into account that some people process information better visually than verbally, and most appreciate having the benefit of both. Technology itself is morally neutral – if we control it, it is our servant. But unfortunately, more often than not, the reverse is true.
This is the case with the cell phone in the classroom (or the church). These highly developed devices are usually “smart phones” meaning that in addition to making and receiving phone calls, they can also be used to receive and send text messages, emails, or access the internet. There is nothing wrong with any of these activities, except when they distract you from real time activity like conversation with a real live person in front of you, which can be a dinner date, or a classroom, and yes even in church!
Because of what these devices can do, the potential for distraction is always high. But it is a real stretch to say that that being distracted is not your own fault, but the fault of the other. Can you imagine saying to your dinner date, “sorry but you are not interesting enough, so I have to yield to the temptation to check this message”?
It annoys me to no end to be in the company of someone who is constantly reaching for their smart phone to read or answer some type of message. It makes me feel so unimportant to that person sitting across from me. To use the logic of the UW study, maybe I’m not interesting enough to motivate the person not to reach for their smart phone. There is only one word to describe the reasoning of people in that study (or outside of it) – ludicrous! Those students should re-assess why they are in that classroom, and how motivated they are to succeed.
I have spent a just a little time teaching at a post-secondary level when I taught at a college in Kenya for six months in two years. In Kenya, everyone has a cell phone or smart phone, whether they can afford it or not. Therefore in the first lecture of each course that I taught, I laid down the law: I don’t want to see (or hear) your phone at any time in my lecture hall. And no, you may not go out into the hall to use your phone. All of my students survived this measure, and some even got pretty good marks!
Of course I can’t do that in church, because people don’t have to be there. When I’m preaching, and I see someone using a smart device, I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are either accessing their online Bible, or taking notes, even though I know that most of them are not. (You would be surprised what the preacher can see – and when someone is looking in their lap and smiling, they are probably zoned out of what is happening in the service). But I will not compete with your smart phone. What you get out of the service really depends on what you put into it. Its up to you.
