Professor Mark Mullane, of the History Department and who is also a former Conn student, kindly agreed to respond to a few questions regarding formality in the classroom. This interview is an addendum to the article “Just Going Off What She Said: Is Formality in the Classroom Still Relevant” which I wrote for last week’s issue of the Voice. Here’s what he had to say:
The College Voice: Do you feel that students are too informal in speech, dress, or conduct in the classroom? Or is strict formality in the classroom a relic of an antiquated approach to teaching and learning that really no longer has a place in the 2013 classroom?
Mullane: “Strict formality” in the classroom is, of course, relative, and I can certainly recall various formulations of it. For me, a strict (and it was) parochial school experience in the late 1970s was followed by a very formal, etiquette-driven preparatory school in the 1980s (where “The Bench” and “The Paddle” were visible threats never used). In my experience, far, far too much emphasis was placed on what you wore, how you spoke (students had a kind of “private language” to which some teachers were privy) and what your parents drove. Of course, none of this (a “semiotic system of exclusion” including speech and apparel) was particularly exceptional. But it made me receptive to a change that came in 1989, when I entered secondary school.
[In secondary school] members of the faculty were very intelligent, and did not need (or want) to rely on strictness or formalities to accentuate authority: most just didn’t need to. It was not, by any means, a school that adopted an alternative approach to education. It was just far more relaxed than anything I had experienced. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, I found this very refreshing. I still do.
My college experience (in part at Connecticut College in the mid-1990s) was in many ways an extension of this secondary school experience. Many students from my graduating class came to ConnColl. Like my academy, ConnColl seems to me (for the most part) polite and respectful, without the need for “strict formalities,” which, because of my experience with them, I am comfortable calling antiquated. But if all things are relative and not approving of text-messaging in the classroom is being “strictly formal” rather than insisting upon decency, politeness or respectfulness, then long live antiquity!
TVC: Do you find it distracting or overly informal when students preface and/or undermine what they are about to say in class by saying, “I don’t know if this is right but…”, “Going off of what she said”, or “this may be completely off but…”?
MM: I really don’t find it distracting. I don’t believe the classroom is a formal debate with any real protocol to be followed. I can, at times, find it overly informal.
The phrase “I don’t know if this is right, but…” does not, to me, indicate that a student isn’t self-assured enough; rather it indicates that a student has likely given some thought to a given subject (at least enough to express uncertainty), and is self-assured enough to offer a line of argument, even if that argument may not be correct. And only the most formal would insist on reformulating “I don’t know if this is right, but…” as “I am not entirely certain, yet I shall attempt to prove that…” The latter is archaic; the former simply familiar, unless the preface repeated often enough by one individual to become a verbal “tick” of sorts.
I am formal enough to want to change “Going off of what she said…” to something more like “Following in the vein of Sarah’s thought…” or even just “Along the same lines…” A familiar tone does not rattle me; poor diction or bad colloquialisms can. But in classroom conversations (rather than in written work), I am usually happy to overlook this sort of thing, even if I make note of it. And what seems to me most important in this phrase is not the diction but the fact that the student is “building upon” (“going off”) another student’s thoughts. There is nothing I find distracting about that.
TVC: Does any of this even matter at all? Does it matter at all how students say something as long they say something?
MM: I do think it matters. I certainly don’t think the ability to articulate yourself well is proportional to your moral quality (a position less than tacitly taken up at my prep school); but good, clear expression is efficient, and it certainly it can have an artistic-aesthetic value in itself.
TVC: As a former student, do you feel that students now have different attitudes towards behavior in the classroom than did you and your peers when you were at Conn?
MM: I don’t really think so. I believe that we were (for the most part) polite and engaged in the classroom, and I see much the same thing now. Conn, in my experience, has always been populated by folks who are friendly, open and interested. And if anything, students are more driven, if only because of the economy: the future is uncertain and most folks want a glowing record across the board when they approach the job market, even if they don’t find all subjects of equal interest all of the time. The real change has been in technology. I can still overlook a brief side-remark in the classroom, but texting (which I have only seen a few times) I do find jarring, even though in reality it may constitute little more than a virtual side-remark. •
