Text messaging. Surfing the Internet. Playing Sudoku.

Kansas University students are up to a whole lot more than simply learning in class.

“I get bored in class,” said Patrick Paynter, a KU senior who admits to hiding his Sudoku beneath a notebook. “It just kind of helps the time pass.”

As a new year begins, many KU faculty have set ground rules. But it’s not easy to stop tardy arrivals to class, ensure cell phones are off and make students respect the rules of classroom decorum in higher education.

“There’s been a tradition that people … grant a certain kind of respect to a university professor – she says something, they just do it,” said Dan Bernstein, director of KU’s Center for Teaching Excellence. “That’s just no longer the case. It requires more explicit management.”

So what are some students up to? All kinds of things.

Paynter said he’s been in class and watched as a student, dressed in costume, burst in and made a scene before running back out. He’s witnessed such spectacles more than once.

Kansas University freshman Mandy Nordyke, of Wichita, checks her cell phone. Text messaging is one of the many ways that students disrupt class, according to KU faculty. Nordyke checked her phone before class started on Wednesday.

“The teacher sometimes chases them out,” he said. “It’s just kind of funny.”

Then there’s the rustling of papers minutes before the end of class.

“Many times, somewhere around five minutes before the class is over, some students will start closing their notebooks,” Bernstein said. “This becomes contagious and there’s a cacophony of closing notebooks. The professor has to try to reclaim that.”

Then there’s Sudoku, newspapers, magazines and the ever-popular text messaging.

“If the lecture gets boring, sometimes I just get my phone out and text people,” said Kyle Davis, a KU sophomore. “It’s not really disruptive. But if too many people are doing it, no one is really paying attention.”

Some more serious students, such as junior Jessica Wood, are left to bear witness to the activities.

“I’m here to get an education,” she said. “I’m not here to do puzzles.”

Bernstein said some students struggle to adapt to the university expectations.

“There are still, at a large school like KU, a lot of students who are ambivalent about education in general,” he said. “For that student, the additional discipline of learning to behave according to conventions you don’t like is a strain.”

The Center for Teaching Excellence this year is trying to tackle issues of “civility” in the classroom.

“One of the things that we’re trying to suggest is that faculty and students early in the semester in every class have a conversation about expectations,” he said.

Erik Herron, associate professor of political science, said he sets the standards and holds students to them.

“While you can’t eliminate all this behavior – I’m sure there are students doing Sudoku, I’m sure there are students text messaging – you try to minimize it so it’s not disruptive to the other students in class,” he said.