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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

In college, of everything that's going on, classes are the least important. Yes, you still need to pass them, but if you're freaking out because someone is distracting you during a boring lecture, you're doing it wrong.

And the boring lecturer is doing it wrong too - wasting your time and money and everyone else's! Be an adult and take matters into your own hands.

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Did you even read the post? The author is hardly freaking out, never worries about passing classes, and never once claims that his lectures are boring. He's simply asking his fellow students to respect each other and the classroom, which is perfectly reasonable.

Furthermore, I know that shitting on universities is en vogue, but give me a break. Perhaps you are the one who "did it wrong" and were bored because you chose the wrong university, or the wrong field of study? Or, just maybe, different people learn in different ways?

The author doesn't claim his lectures are boring. He claims that his classmates "whip out a phone mid class to text friends or browse Facebook", which is boredom behavior. So while the author may or may not be bored in class, his classmates obviously are.

And yes, "freaking out" was the wrong way to phrase "so overly concerned/bored that writing a blog post about the issue was necessary".

The issue here is that there is no lecture -- it's workshop. Everyone in the classroom is participating, so to be the student constantly checking a cellphone alienates you somewhat, and you end up distracting most of the class from the work at hand, which is usually trying to help improve someone else's work. Unfortunately, asking the person to stop rarely works. They'll put down the phone for about five minutes, but the request rarely holds and their hand is back on the phone rather quickly.

Well that's just a personal skill/attribute. I have met with people one on one before and they are incessently checking their cell phone. Very rude when you're trying to get thing done or communicate with them.

I'm confused - all of the workshop and small-group work I've ever done in classrooms (including college) involves an epic amount of shifting, moving, digging for materials, talking, talking loudly, and sometimes shouting. Someone checking a smartphone in that environment would actually be reducing the distractions in the room.

That all sounds far less organized than what we work with in my classes. It's mostly open, but you shouldn't interrupt folks, nobody should need to shout, and you should give room for others to speak. I've only seen people shift around when multiple workshops were going on, usually resulting in small groups working on different pieces, but that's fairly rare and I've seen most instructors abandon it after the first try due to the amount of noise it produces and the tendency to drift off into discussing daily life and such.

It all sort of operates on the idea that you're actually a nice person, capable of behaving reasonably, and discussing things like an adult (or how we believe adults should discuss things even though this is rarely the case). The idea is to ensure the other person wants to return to what they made, and it's enough for one person to treat the work poorly (perhaps in showing they don't care by focusing on their phone) to bother someone, especially newcomers to workshops.

30 humans working independently or in small groups in a 20 foot x 20 foot classroom create almost as much noise as a jet engine, regardless of age or maturity or nationality or other factors. That's something I learned in college.

This changes things a bit. It's no longer "I'm distracted because someone else is on their own phone." It's now: "I'm not getting anything out of this class and we're not accomplishing what we're supposed to be doing because my knucklehead teammates won't pay attention."

This is probably where some communication skills would come in hand. I have no problem with a quick "Hey, nilium, can we please just get this done?" or "Your hot date can wait for you text".

Granted, I've also been very lucky in having self motivated or self chosen teammates for most of my university group work.

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