<p>Its NOT relevant because this is a discussion about GRAD school, and the faulty assumption that a professor will automatically think badly about a student if they are contacted by a parent. They may think badly about the parent, but their opinion of the student should be based on their interaction with the student.</p>
<p>I have better things to do this morning than try to get you to understand that there is a world outside that of your anecdotal second or third hand tangentially related stories of possible associates cousins bosses conversation with a professor at a college. Enough already.</p>
<p>** cross posted with zooser… Maybe the cc’ers are second cousins? Or past supervisors friends?</p>
If cc gets the stories about the cousins, former high school classmates and college acquaintances, I wonder if the cousins, former high school classmates and college acquaintances get the cc stories.</p>
<p>She could certainly complain to the University about this. Doesn’t mean she will get anywhere with it, and I don’t think it would be a good idea anyway. But not necessarily for the reasons you submitted.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it does tend to leave a negative impression of the student on the faculty who is contacted by a parent on an everyday matter like concerns over Prof. absences from what I’ve seen of faculty/Ta reactions to parents intervening on behalf of their undergrads in publications like the Chronicle of Higher Ed and IRL…whether justified or not. </p>
<p>It’s no different from reactions workplace supervisors would have if a parent of an entry-level…or any employee who’s twenty-something and up would have if a parent calls them up to complain about the child’s performance review, lobby for raises/promotions, etc.</p>
<p>As a professor, I can say this is highly unusual (from my experience) and also wrong. The professor is being paid to teach, and not teaching means that she is not fulfilling her duties.</p>
<p>I do wonder if perhaps OP is not getting the full story. Is it possible that the professor has created some alternative to class time for teaching the students? (Not that an entire month of alternative work sounds like a good idea, but at least the prof would be doing something to meet her responsibilities.)</p>
<p>As for what OP should do, that’s a hard question. If the daughter is fine with the situation, I think the parent is stuck. On the other hand, I do think that if the prof has just gone AWOL, then the students should have a chat with the dean.</p>
Hmmm… good question. Maybe during those subway rides or suburban barbecues, the conversation turns to “I heard from the parents of college/grad students on a forum in which I am active, that…”</p>
<p>There’s a possibility the class is in the format of the colloquiums and seminars I’ve taken in my latter undergrad years and in grad school where class only meets for the first half or slight more in the semester and the rest of the time is devoted for research and writeup of a long research paper or completion of a large term project.</p>
<p>This is a Professional Grad School class (architecture, accounting, engineering, nursing, public health) correct? The student is over 21 and an adult. This is the student’s issue, even if the parent is paying.</p>
<p>If the student passes & earns the required grade for the class and thus earns the professional graduate degree, who really cares if another professional (in this case an academic professional) needs to miss work (teaching) for a conflict. We’ve all had employers who were generous with flex time/time off toi deal with personal issues over the years; please show the same courtesy. Yo’re employer didn’t repremand or garnish your wages when you missed time at work during a rough patch.</p>
<p>The usual standard that I have read is that 1 credit hour unit means 3 hours of work per week total, including both in class and out of class time. So a 15 credit course load should theoretically take 45 hours of work per week.</p>
<p>Of course, actual workloads have been declining; there are some indications that workload per week is now only about 28 to 36 hours per week for full time students. There are also cases where courses are over or under rated; lab courses and those with term projects tend to take more time than other courses of similar credits. See <a href=“Why College Students Leave the Engineering Track - The New York Times”>Why College Students Leave the Engineering Track - The New York Times; and add 15 hours of class time (18 hours for majors with lab courses) to the numbers in the study time chart.</p>
<p>Both your and your daughter are right to be annoyed about this. However, as others have said, not much you can do about it especially if your daughter doesn’t want you to. You could get the prof in trouble of some sort, but given your d is getting credit for the class, damages to her are limited. To me, a substitute of some sort should be in the class. The student is paying for an education in a classroom, not to simply read the material on her own. I am not sure why some think it is just fine for a professor to miss half the classes in a semester.</p>
<p>In my maters program in engineering, graduate level classes were critical to the process and having a professor there to teach an intergral part of the experience.</p>
<p>I get annoyed by a lot of things. I guess I’m turning into an old crank. But what I say and do about a lot of the things that annoy me depend upon the degree of annoyance. When it comes to things in my kids’ lives, it depends on where they are in life. </p>
<p>When they were little kids, I’d be more involved. In high school, I would try to get them to start handling a lot of those things themselves. COllege, I don’t think I even heard or knew about most things, and I had to go blind and deaf to some things. After college… it would have to be a pretty big deal to get involved.</p>
<p>Life threatening, medical issues, I’d be right there. Legal issue, say criminal charges, the same. Danger, again the same. When it comes to lesser impact issues, the chances start to diminish,and frankly that my son’s class has missed two meetings does give me a bit of a twitch, but not enough to do anything about it. I think my son’s a bit too pleased about not having to go to the class, and I might have made a remark about that, but it’s just a blip on my annoyance meter these days. I’m certainly not going to do anything about it.</p>
<p>OP again. First of all, I never stated or suggested that I could or should “do” anything, and in fact said quite the opposite, so the turn taken by the discussion about parental interference was quite off-topic (but not surprising–some posters just love taking a detour into controversial territory). I realize all I can do is lean on my kid to speak up–doubt that will happen. I posted to find out if my reaction was reasonable and whether this sort of thing was as unusual as I thought. And to vent, of course!</p>
<p>
In this case, no. These were previously scheduled classes, and by semester’s end, the class will have met about half of the intended time.
I don’t see the analogy here at all. When I took time off from work for a pressing personal matter (which was certainly never as long as a month), I worked with my boss and colleagues to assure coverage of my work and stayed in close touch to offer help and make sure nothing fell through the cracks. I didn’t just disappear. “Courtesy” has nothing to do with it. And keep in mind that this professor didn’t even feel the need to explain her absence. She didn’t cite a family matter or anything else and didn’t apologize–which I think shows an unfortunate lack of respect for her students. For all they know she’s sunning herself on the Riviera.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone for your input. I think I’ve gotten all I can from this thread. But carry on if you like!</p>
<p>I took an undergraduate level class at Umich which met twice a week, and the professor arranged that one of those days each week a different group of students would give a presentation to teach a section of the course, and she didn’t come to class. She missed a lot of her days to teach, too, and when she did teach she was very unorganized. The class seemed like a lot of pretty inaccessible information thrown together willy-nilly that we had to figure out what to do with ourselves. One day she had her husband come in to teach instead, who I guess was supposed to be qualified to teach and did teach a different course at the university, but the whole thing was just bizarre.</p>
<p>We all must have done pretty terribly because I was expecting to fail the course and ended up with a B+. I felt really cheated by this class, I’d taken it for a reason and I didn’t learn a single thing. But, I was failing it-- if I’d gotten to just not go to class and still learn the material and get a good grade, I probably would have been okay with that. I had classes like that, too. If I were the parent in the equation I would probably feel just the same as you do, but in my classes the lectures really supplemented the reading in most cases, not the other way around, so if the reading was adequate I don’t know that I’d feel more than a passing irritation with the prof-- as a student I was too busy to worry about getting my moneys worth in principle, I just wanted the knowledge and the credits and to move on. So, I get your D’s attitude, too, if she is learning the material. I know it’s difficult to imagine you could really learn the material from reading as well as you could from a lecture, but I think I only took a handful of profs at Michigan that were so good they were better than the books. Sad but true.</p>
<p>OP said she was “steaming”. Annoyed I get. Steaming seems a bit strong. Don’t know how expensive the course is, but annoyed seems to be about the right level of affect, IMO.</p>
<p>Depends on the type of course and program. </p>
<p>For a lower to intermediate undergrad or skills-based class like foreign languages, yes.</p>
<p>However, for more independent research/large term project one is very likely to encounter in advanced undergrad/graduate programs, the credits one is paying for is just as much/more to denote the substantial independent work one is required to do outside of class meeting sessions. </p>
<p>The Professor’s role in such courses is also much more hands off, especially in the latter part of the term. Instead of presenting the information to the students throughout the term, the Professor becomes more of a facilitator/guide on-call as needed via office hours, email, or any other communication medium for draft sessions or questions on the independent research paper/long term project. </p>
<p>Very different from most undergrad courses or more massive class oriented professional graduate programs like Law, MBA, or Medicine.</p>