Remind Me To Do This

In his new book The Social Animal, David Brooks cites a psychology experiment I'd like to replicate: in a college psychology class, the students decided to do an experiment on the professor (I'm surprised my students haven't done something like this to me, Lord knows I deserve it as I'm always doing stupid experiments on them) and it was simple yet effective; every time the professor moved to the left side of the room, the students appeared distracted and looked away from him, but every time he moved to the right side of the room, they became attentive and engaged . . . by the end of the period he was nearly out the door (on the right side of the room, of course) and if I read this during the school year, I'd have students doing it to teachers immediately, but since it's summer, I'm going to have to rely on my memory, and-- as this post proves-- this blog is more powerful than my memory.

2 comments:

stacey said...

This is actually going to be an interesting experiment! I can't wait to see if you can trick your students into paying attention in all of their classes!

I wonder if we could get the entire school to do it. I will gladly teach in the hallway!

Christie should hire you for his education reform team.

Dave said...

this took me a second . . . but i see your point-- if the kids are pretending to pay attention for the experiment, they might actually be paying attention . . .

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