As a college professor I agree completely. I forget who I heard if from but I remember someone saying that if your class is failing the problem isn't the students it is your pedagogy.
Certainly there are always individual students who fail but if most of them fail the midterm and it is only afterwards that you learn they don't understand the book then you aren't doing a very good job of tracking their progress and you aren't actually teaching them.
I don't know how large his classes are. It can certainly be hard to monitor what students are doing in a large lecture hall but in a smaller class of 20 students or so I haven't had much difficulty with students who wouldn't put their phones away when I asked them to.
Certainly there are always individual students who fail but if most of them fail the midterm and it is only afterwards that you learn they don't understand the book then you aren't doing a very good job of tracking their progress and you aren't actually teaching them.
I don't know how large his classes are. It can certainly be hard to monitor what students are doing in a large lecture hall but in a smaller class of 20 students or so I haven't had much difficulty with students who wouldn't put their phones away when I asked them to.