@tiger1307 - ok, that’s great that Z and G are now more mature about their educational opportunities.
So they’re not great examples of “go ahead and skip class” - because it’s a bozo behavior and they were lucky, OR because they’ve repented, OR both.
@fretfulmother heres the point. NOT everyone needs to go to all the classes College is different from high school.
I guess in your book Zuckerberg has kept up his bozo behavior at work. It is my understanding at FB the coders make up their own work schedule as long as they get the job done. FB is rated the number one place in America to work
I teach freshman writing. You bet I count class participation and attendance. In fact, the school has an official policy automatically withdrawing students who miss more than 5 meetings.
Granted, freshman comp is a somewhat special case. In lecture based courses, attendance usually isn’t formally counted – although at elite schools, humanities courses generally have a separate discussion section, where attendance is very much counted as part of a participation grade. And yes, if I noticed a student was routinely not showing up to lecture, while I hope I would have the wherewithal not to glare, I wouldn’t be pleased, and – if the grading standards gave me any room to do so – would at least consider it in the final grade in borderline case. Just last week, I was discussing class participation grades with the professor for a course I was TAing. She mentioned by name two students who she had noticed routinely skipping lectures, and instructed me to take it into account.
Maybe it is different in the sciences. In English, however, the reality is that even a well-designed course isn’t going to test whether or not the student has done the bulk of the reading – or skipped a number of classes. Usually, the majority of your grade in a college literature course is determined by essay grades. If there are eight novels assigned and you’ve read three of them and come to at least some of the class meetings on those novels, you can do well on your essays. In a very large course, professors sometimes get around this problem by assigning essay-based final exams that require students to address a range of works. But if the course is small enough that you can keep track of attendance, why not do it?
I will add that in my experience, seminar based classes live and die on student participation. Why shouldn’t I reward the students who were present and engaged?
I guess on the subject of attendance, I wear four hats - all support attendance mattering:
Missing classes was not something which rendered a student on the road to failure. Not at that time.
For full disclosure I let you know I skipped the classes. I did attend all plenary sessions, which were required. Peer contribution is one thing which would not have happened in that particular class, so that aspect of the classroom environment was not diminished or impacted at all.
One could throw it up in the air and determine the professor was merely responding to seeing an often-absent student reach for a paper, or was responding to a face that contravened her expectations for the expectations she had of a student who identifies as I do racially and culturally. As she had made the comment about possibly needing remedial help in a different semester, my first semester of contact with her, she set the tone.
The context on the whole lets me know that she had no expectation that the work could be mine, though many of you seem to need more.
I think that acting in a bigoted manner can be reflexive, even if it outside of the mores one feels one should live up to. Sometimes having a reason to hold to one’s convictions is the biggest surprise of all, and calls one to dig deep and ask one’s self to begin to develop a pattern and practice which reflects one’s stated convictions. (I do not know how she would describe herself.)
For the person who asked if I was the parent or the student, I am the parent. I let my daughter submit a question months ago.
Being a professor is an earned privilege as well. There must be a point at which a professor understands that her own ideas will be challenged, and she will have reason to learn something new.
Waiting2exhale: Thank you for posting and sharing your story. It was very meaningful to me.
I am so sorry that was part of your college experience.
It would have been meaningful if it had been “I attended class, participated and the prof didn’t believe a black student was capable of such a good paper.” It loses its oomph when the student skips AND the prof gives an A and publishes the paper.
" As a parent, the thought of paying piles of money for my kid to not attend, makes me see red. What a phenomenal waste. And to miss the opportunities, too! Even in a “boring” class (which by the way teaches coping skills and cooperation and respect because in life, you’re not supposed to always act out your rudest impulses), you might make a new friend or pick up something you didn’t know before. "
Darn straight! I worked too hard to give my kids a paid-for college education for them to be entitled blow-offs. Thankfully neither of them were that way. Yuck.
Let me try again
4.Going to class can sometimes be boring and a waste of time and will depend on the class. Going to office hours or section can often times be much more important and productive use of ones time.
Lets give everyone a hypothetical. Suppose this was a math class. Suppose the teacher was black and the student was an asian boy and the same thing happened Would we be getting the same responses or would we hear how the teacher was discriminating against the little boy genius?
What a nonsensical hypothetical. I don’t care if you are white, black, purple or polka dotted - you should be making every reasonable best effort to attend class because that’s your freakin’ job at this stage in your life.
“Because it’s boring” is silly. Lots of work meetings are boring but you don’t just get to skip out on them. Lots of tasks associated with raising a family are boring too, but they gotta be done.
You know, it strikes me that in light of the racism that black kids DO face, you’d think that a thoughtful one would want to engage in behaviors that dispel a stereotype, not further it.
@tiger1307 - if you read what I posted, I don’t doubt that the teacher was racist in the story. I’m not clear where you’re going with your responses, except to say regarding:
“1. This is college not HIGH SCHOOL”
…This reminds me of when I have juniors who are so insistent that they’re nothing like freshmen, that it starts to make me wonder if they really are so mature after all… Which is to say, I rarely hear mature, sensible people be so vociferous about how different college must be from high school in terms of classes. (Obviously it’s a different living environment etc.)
I went to high school; I went to college; I went to graduate school; I teach now. There are more similarities than differences when you’re talking about transmission and development of knowledge in the classroom.
If a large number…especially half or more did, I would.
If it’s one or several, I’m much more inclined to believe that they were misplaced into a lower than appropriate level class due to poor advising or constrained into doing so by an exceedingly bureaucratic college administration.
Incidentally, the reaction from the students to the lectures I gave in my friend’s social science survey was surprisingly positive. He jokingly told me he was a bit miffed when multiple students from both sections(50-70 students each) asked him when could he have me back as they enjoyed my lectures.
While it would be nice if such a student was so inclined, I’d also feel bad he/she’s not in a class with a larger critical mass of his/her academic peers.
I’m also of the opinion Profs/instructors who expect this of such students are not only making an entitled imposition on such a student, but also acting unbecoming by effectively using him/her as an effective TA of sorts and thus…exploiting the student to offload key components of their job…to teach the course. That includes being the main facilitator of discussions.
I’ve known a few Profs who made complaints across those lines to me in the course of chatting them up during office hours and after I finished their courses.
If I were the Prof and knew the student was skipping class…wouldn’t matter. If they were developmental admits, legacies, frat/sorority members, or any other student who skipped my class…I’ll let a sort of natural selection take place as most will likely incur negative consequences in doing so in the form of bad/failing grades. And the only time I’ll point it out to them is if they come into office hours near finals time/end of course to complain about their impending/actual bad/failing grades and say…too bad…them’s the breaks for skipping class.
On the flipside, if the student concerned did well in the class despite skipping most/all the lectures, wouldn’t care and if anything…felt that was demonstrated proof admissions did a great job in admitting them…though I would be concerned that they would have been better off in a much more advanced class…especially if the department I was teaching in was that student’s major.
Skipping classes is a bad idea in general. It’s a waste of good tuition money, and it frequently results in the student failing the class because they didn’t learn. I don’t recommend it it.
However, this disrecommendation comes from my vast experierce with this bad policy in my undergrad career. I skipped a whole lot of classes. I got As in some of those classes,and, ahem, didn’t do so well in others.Not once did my professors ever take a look at my white face and assert that I couldn’t possibly have done the work I handed in or the tests I aced.
Apparently waiting’s profs had a different reaction to waiting’s black face than my profs had to my white face. Why would that be?
NO it is not your job to attend class. It IS YOUR JOB to do well in class. There is a basic difference between the two. Also the stereotypes and prejudices are in the mind of the person possessing them That is their problem. If they have them they are in bad need of cultural awareness training.
It is not the task of a black person or a brown person to act like a white person
IMHO it is very racist to consider the advice to attend class, to mean the same thing as instructing “a black person or a brown person to act like a white person”.
Amen. I had one where the professor LITERALLY read the textbook to us in class. No discussion, no adding to the material. I looked at my syllabus, noted attendance was worth 10% of the grade and decided to take a 90. And a 90 is what I got because I did read the text and study for exams, and I could write a mean paper, so every grade was literally an A+.
She attempted to give me an incomplete for that semester but I escalated to the dept head with the syllabus and my grades in hand and got it changed to an A.
I went to my other classes. That one was just a ridiculous waste of time. I doubt that prof stayed on much longer. She was hardly even phoning it in.
This was when I attended a CUNY while also working full-time to support myself…I paid for the class, it was my time I was rationing out. If I had it to do over I’d do exactly the same thing.
Agreed and it was reflected in the fact classroom/online discussion participation counted for around 10-20% of the final grade. However, unlike most teachers/Profs where nearly all types of participation was practically considered “easy/freebie points”, I’ve had a few Profs who were not only strict on what was a “valuable contribution” to warrant awarding participation credit for the seminar session, but would also issue “negative” participation credit if one’s participation showed one didn’t do the reading, engaged in uncivil/disrespectful behavior in discussions with fellow students, or the points made were judged to be inexplicably irrelevant/stupid*.
Also, none of my undergrad Profs, including those giving colloquium/seminar classes ever felt the need to take attendance.
Yes, but it might also suggest that I was doing too much else for the students. I use PowerPoint slides in a couple of classes and post them online. I also post the solutions to midterm and final exams from the past couple of years. In addition, I post complete solutions to the current semester’s problem sets. Finally, I often relent and post solutions to the previous year’s problem sets as well. Add in grade inflation, and a bright student may be able to do well without attending regularly. That does not mean that the student will do as well as he could have in the class or in subsequent classes, however.
My husband worked more than full-time during college. Some lecture classes he went for the first class and the tests and he made As always. Sometimes his professors in those classes tried to talk him into switching his major to their depts because he had so much seeming ability in that subject. No one ever questioned whether his work was his own. He is white.
adding: Since my husband was paying his own tuition and all his living expenses, what his parents might have thought about him not going to classes, if they had been aware of it, wouldn’t have mattered at all to him.
Since I had the luxury both of not working and of taking classes with agreeable professors in subjects which interested me, I went to class. A few times I dropped classes when I didn’t care for the professor. If a professor had treated me as Waiting2exhale describes, my first reaction would have been to drop the class if at all possible. Sometimes one has to just suck it up for a required class, but I was fortunate to have been spared that experience.
Waiting2exhale: Was what you describe a common experience for you? Could you find professors that didn’t treat you in this way?
I didn’t go to work today. My coworkers aren’t all that bright, and I can get everything done tomorrow. I do this at least twice a week. No need to waste my time.