Congratulations, reader — you have survived your first few weeks of the semester. You have navigated your way from the Ag Campus to the Hill and only gotten lost a few times. You have already missed one homework assignment but have bought yourself a fancy UT planner to ease your guilt. You have established your seat in each of your classrooms that you will not move from all semester. You have lost at least one syllabus and cursed the Blackboard app for not working on your iPhone. And you are already counting down the days until Winter Break.
Every college student suffers from apathy at one point or another during his or her fourth (or fifth, or sixth) year in the university system. Trying to write your English 101 paper can sometimes be like trying to swim through Jell-O, especially when reruns of “Jersey Shore” are on. Or when you really need to clean your room. In fact, writing those papers on a short story about dead dogs or reading those 30-page articles on world economics can sound less appealing than scrubbing toilets.
Sometimes this academic apathy can border on sheer, unadulterated boredom. We have all (admit it) almost fallen asleep in at least one class, or zoned out during our big lecture classes while playing solitaire on our laptops. It’s no wonder teachers are starting to forbid laptops in classrooms — it has become increasingly hard for them to compete with Facebook or Netflix.
It is easy to sit around and blame technology for the increasingly smaller attention span of the average student. It is obviously true that cell phones and computers have made it easier to access mindless entertainment and are becoming increasingly harder for teachers to spot. But blaming technology for our goldfish-like concentration is only one piece of a larger issue: Students today have become a much harder group to get excited about academics.
It is drilled into our heads that our chances of being employed will increase with a bachelor’s degree and will become even greater with a master’s or a Ph.D. But this message does not tell the whole truth about the employment line in today’s world: It is not enough to merely have a college degree anymore. Academic performance is becoming a much greater factor than it was 10 or 20 years ago. With fewer jobs available to graduating students, employers are no longer satisfied with a piece of paper stating you fulfilled the requirements of your major and your institution. Your resumé and your grade point average are going to play a significant role in your employment offerings — no longer can you fly through college with a 1.8 GPA and “keg-standing” on your resumé. The only way to guarantee a top-notch performance during our time in college is to engage ourselves with the material we are studying, because we all know how difficult it is to write an A-quality paper on a topic that we would rather die than research.
The question then becomes one of reconciling our dependence on technology and our need to engage ourselves in our academics. I stumbled across an article on Wednesday morning that extols the Internet as the best way to spark creativity and engage learners. The author, Cathy N. Davidson, argues in her article, “Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age,” in The Chronicle Review that our distraction when looking things up online actually can get us thinking about things that would have never crossed our minds otherwise. I often harp on the interconnectivity of disciplines, and this is never more obvious as when we perform a simple Google search. The Internet, through its endless parade of ads and links, creates connections between subjects and ideas that can often inspire a new way of viewing something; and this originality and creativity will ultimately be the savior of our low grades and our apathy.
Give it a try: When your next paper on child education rolls around, try a simple Google search. My search led me to a site where you can purchase Mozart CDs for your baby. When I started thinking about the ridiculousness of the concept that Mozart makes babies smarter, I realized I had fodder for a potential paper (albeit a fairly childish one, if you’ll pardon my pun). Do not hesitate to allow your love of technology to inspire your next creative paper topic — just don’t look it up on your laptop in class.
— Sarah Russell is a junior in history. She can be reached at srusse22@utk.edu.
