<p>This doesn’t seem fair to the student . The teacher should be reprimanded . I can understand her plight if student asks too many questions , but her response seems rude and harsh .</p>
<p>This is a very difficult situation for an instructor. How to balance the input of individuals with the whole of the class. I don’t think the adjunct handled it correctly but it is difficult.</p>
<p>I do NOT believe the adjunct handled this correctly - I think she had poor judgement, little tact, and deserves to be reprimanded. As a speech pathologist, this is without a doubt one of the saddest things I have heard in months. Shame on her. </p>
<p>The brand new lawyer for the California Speech and Hearing Association has a severe stutter, and says that he was interested in becoming our lawyer because of it. We had a meeting with him last month, and when he had a block, we simply WAITED. With our mouths CLOSED. Until the time he got his thought out, which was invariably funny, wise, and worth waiting for. Sounds like Phillip was too.</p>
<p>The professor seems rude but the student seems . . . a bit uncaring or clueless. </p>
<p>This is one case where the details make all the difference. Tone of voice from the professor and degree to which the class started to lag are important. </p>
<p>I have a major disability. It is a balancing act between expecting others to accommodate my slowness versus me not taking on an event where I will constipate the entire party’s experience. The more years go by, the better I am at evaluating what will work. </p>
<p>Too bad the prof didn’t email “I’m having a hard time with the class flow going differently than what I’ve had before. We need to find a way where your contributions can be heard but that also keeps the discussion moving. Do you have any ideas of what might work?”</p>
<p>With today’s technology, it might be that the student could keyboard his comments and have them displayed on a screen. In that way we have his wit and insight but also cover the topic with lots of input from an array of students in the class. An online discussion forum might be another way to zip things along. </p>
<p>The student and prof could have worked for a “win-win”. </p>
<p>I note that the student has been home schooled. It is possible that the student isn’t used to the process whereby an instructor has to gallop to make two or three dozen voices heard (particularly important if “participation in discussion” is part of the grade).</p>
<p>I think the professor handled this very poorly.</p>
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<p>The student is 16.</p>
<p>I read this article with great interest, for a number of reasons—the school is nearby; D2 has speech issues; I just finished Professor X’s “Basement/Ivory Tower” book about adjunct faculty at community colleges. </p>
<p>The teacher sounds like one I’ve encountered in the past, who was so overwhelmed with class size that she eliminated the most obvious irritant. Youngest student in the class, overeager to participate, monopolizes classtime, doesn’t “come to the point” because of speech impediment. Of course, when this happened to D2 it was during PRESCHOOL… </p>
<p>If he, or any student, is interrupting the flow of class discussion, she should make it clear that ALL comments and questions need to wait until the end of class. If he is monopolizing discussion time, she should pull him aside and explain that, while his comments may be valid, he can only be expected to be recognized a fair percent of the time–as a home schooled student, he may not be properly socialized for the size class she is dealing with, and needs to be made aware of the etiquette of large classes.</p>
<p>I feel that reading this story I don’t have much information to judge. It depends on so many factors and what was involved leading up to this situation. We really only have one side of the story here. </p>
<p>As a professor, I need to juggle a lot: getting through the material in 1 hour and 20 minutes, keeping the students focused, engaging in a meaningful class discussion and letting everyone have some air time to ask questions or engage in discussion. if a student dominates the class time, regardless of reason, I would most definitely have to respond. If a reasonable solution wasn’t found, I would eventually cut such a student off out of fairness to the rest of the class.</p>
<p>Call me cold hearted, but I have no idea whatsoever how often this student had their hand up in the air and how much time was taken with each response. It isn’t about patience at all, it’s about time and classroom management and trying to being fair to the entire class not just one individual. </p>
<p>I think it would take quite a balancing act to quench his thirst for participation, and at the same time, keep the class going. I would hope she had at least made other suggestions along the way, to manage his enthuasiasm to participate and all the other stuff she has to fit into a short period of time. If those suggestions failed, I would most definitely use something creative such as “how about writing out your questions”?The part we read about is extreme and seems uncalled for…unless she tried a lot else beforehand (which I’m hoping she did).</p>
<p>It is noteworthy that is really highly regarded by her students on ratemyprofessor, fwiw.</p>
<p>I wonder how many other people in that class are talking. In my experience, as a high school student also taking community college courses, I am oftentimes the only person who bother to responds to the teacher’s questions. Of course, my experience is only one class, and maybe the class is more discussion oriented.</p>
<p>^All of my classes are very discussion oriented and I think it has to do with how the professor chooses to run the class, the class size, and also the nature of the material. So who knows here but its a good point. Lots of context we are missing.</p>
<p>I wanted to mention that last year I had a blind student in my class (he had suddenly become blind from retinal detachment related to Marfan’s syndrome, out of the blue between his freshman and sophomore year). We worked together throughout the term, with me trying to learn how to read aloud my graphs and other visuals, but to do it to the amount he needed, I could not possibly get through the class (or keep the rest awake). But we met outside of class everyday and I could go over those aspects with him. That was my balance to meet his needs and those of the class. From what I understand of this article, this professor also made herself available to the student as well.</p>
<p>[Moderator Note: A different and detailed article appears below. Two threads on same topic have been merged.]</p>
<p>Seriously? Unbelievable.
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<p>Read more: [College</a> adjunct tells stuttering student not to talk in class](<a href=“http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/312616#ixzz1aTTgDoSu]College”>http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/312616#ixzz1aTTgDoSu)</p>
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<p>I wonder the same thing.</p>
<p>The issue here may not be the stutter but the possibility that the student attempted to monopolize class discussion. He is a home-schooled high school student, and he may not be familiar with classroom decorum and the need to share the floor. The instructor gets good reviews from other students and apparently is effective in the classroom. There may be more to this situation than meets the eye.</p>
<p>There are a few points in the article that suggest there are two sides to the story, such as the statement that the student “speaks in paragraphs.” We also don’t really have the chronology of the escalation of the situation–perhaps only the last few communications were harsh, because the kid didn’t respond to less pointed comments. It does sound like a situation where truly accomodating this kid might have infringed on the intererests of the other kids.</p>
<p>Thanks for merging the threads, p3t. I did a search before posting it and didn’t find this thread. There is also a blurb about this incident in “Inside Higher Education” [Quick</a> Takes: October 11, 2011 - Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/11/qt]Quick”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/11/qt) It does not indicate that the student had other issues that could have been disruptive to the class. Is that written in the NYT article?</p>
<p>I think there’s more to this than the article can possibly describe. The boy may be socially immature or a “naive observer” type, making points that are new to him but obvious to more experienced people, he may have an ego that needs stroking, he may go off track by making a connection that is insightful and yet not quite relevant to the topic being discussed…and yes, he does have a stutter.</p>
<p>The professor probably took a dislike to him for any number of reasons. This is unfortunate and unfair, but the skills that got this boy to college at 16 will likely allow him to overcome this obstacle (and plenty more like it in the years to come) and succeed.</p>
<p>I found the most compelling part of the article to be the other students in the class who said he did speak up but not excessively so.</p>
<p>Even if his participation was dominating class time…the Prof was way out of line in her comments IMO. </p>
<p>Especially when his classmates have attested that his participation wasn’t egregiously dominant than other heavy participants in the class. </p>
<p>From my vantage point, it sounds as if she is clueless about how to gently dampen down enthusiastic participants to allow more students who may be less engaged to participate. Especially considering my own experiences in the classroom as both student and substitute lecturer in a community college history course where I had to manage two class sessions of 50-75 students alone. </p>
<p>What she did by telling him to keep quiet in class is one classic way bad jerkish teachers/Profs have undermined/destroyed the very enthusiasm and learning that’s critical in not only driving bright intelligent students…but also critical in generating a new generation of well-educated citizens/scholars. Experienced such teachers myself in K-12…though I was fortunate enough to realize early that the problem is with the a*****e teachers/Profs…not necessarily me or other students. </p>
<p>This behavior is even more shocking considering that at most mainstream colleges/universities where I’ve sat in on lectures or my own experience substitute teaching a friend’s college history survey course, most teachers/Profs would actually welcome a student like him considering the extreme passivity/disengagement of most undergrads that I’ve seen. </p>
<p>In almost every case of a few students dominating class discussion…it was not because those students were “hogging” all the time…but that the rest of the students were just too passive or otherwise couldn’t be bothered to participate no matter how engaging the teacher/Prof was and their tireless efforts to try getting them to engage.</p>
<p>I went back to the articles, and I noticed that it’s not clear that the teacher’s comments to the student had anything to do with his stutter. She said (according to him) “your speaking is disruptive.” We’ll never hear the other side of this one, though, even if there is one.</p>
<p>As is usually the case on CC discussions, we all jump to our own conclusions with very little information to go on but we still fill in the gaps in our knowledge with whatever biases we already have. Here is now the professor’s version of what happened. For anyone who has ever had to mediate conflict, you know very well that there are always two very different versions of the same reality:</p>
<p><a href=“Professor of Philip Garber, N.J. Stutterer, Defends Actions - The New York Times”>Professor of Philip Garber, N.J. Stutterer, Defends Actions - The New York Times;