Have I missed anything?
Published on Feb 5, 2007 at 10:47 am.
2 Comments.
Filed under college teaching.
Wow, this weekend kept me busy.
Last week was the third week of the semester. For some reason, there are always a few students who don’t come to class the first two or three weeks. I never understand that. They somehow think that they can just start whenever they feel like it. So, I had a student show up for her first class late this past week. Now, we lost a day early in the semester due to an ice storm, but she had not been to the other classes. She said that she’d been on bed rest due to illness. Now, I can understand being sick. I can understand that might interfere with normal activities. But, missing three weeks of the semester? I’d have drug myself to class if possible, and dropped if not. After all, that is about 20% of the semester right there. So, she emails me after the first class and says that she felt like she was behind. Um, yeah. I am sympathetic, but I can’t take the time to individually spend three weeks worth of time teaching her what she missed. Another student emails me saying that work kept him from making the first three labs. He wants to know when he can make them up. Well, …, never. There is a lot of equipment to set up, and we have people who set that stuff up and take it down. It is a lot of work to set up one experimental setup. Besides, the lab is in use most of the time, so there is no time to just go in there. Even if there were, it isn’t the sort of thing that we can leave open. Someone has to be there, and that someone is me. I have already been there for that lab, and he missed it.
Now, sometimes students have problems, and I will always try to work with them. I am available outside of class, and far more than my posted office hours. But, they need to at least make an effort. And, they need to realize that missing class or lab means missing something. Showing up late for class means missing something. Now, sometimes that is unavoidable. But, doing so regularly shows either poor planning of schedules or perhaps lack of effort. It always astounds me when students show up after missing two or three classes and ask, “Have I missed anything?” No. We just sat there and didn’t do anything because you weren’t in class.  And then they get upset when they find that I covered material other than just what was in the book. Well, yes. That’s what they pay me for. Anyone can read the book, if they have the skills to be in college. I am not going to read it to you. Then they want me to copy my notes to give to them. Well, first of all, we don’t have a budget to copy handouts for all students. Second, and this really bothers them, my notes are just that — notes. I have a work or phrase or some such to remind me to cover topics. Except for certain topics, or specific information that I don’t want to memorize, I often don’t look at my notes until well through the lecture, and then just to make sure that I didn’t leave out something that I wanted to cover. Most of this stuff is in my head — again, that’s why I’m a college professor. So, their looking at my notes does not help them any.
Then, there are the ones that come to me and tell me that they are going to miss all of the next week or two in order to go on vacation. They want to know if they’ll miss anything, either.
Now, you contrast that with the students who always show up, and are always on time. They get all worked up when something really does come up that makes them late or even miss a class. Sometimes sickness happens. Sometimes work really does interfere. But, these students make every effort to not miss, and when they do, they fully realize how much they are missing, and make every effort to find out what they missed. Some of them send a recorder with a friend to tape the lecture (of course, now it is most often a digital recorder, not a tape!). They still miss, but the attitude is different. And because of that, missing seems to have far less of a bad effect on their studies.
-Astroprof
Brian on February 5, 2007 at 12:44 pm: 1
My gut tells me that, of the students who skip the first few weeks of class, most (approaching 99%) are young and not paying their own way through school.
Just a guess of course.
DPG on February 6, 2007 at 6:59 am: 2
Having taught several years of evening PH and ASTR as a PT instructor, I can vouch for every one of your examples. I would have not believed the attitudes had I not lived through them. And you are right - you can tell the difference between the sincere ones that need to work through a problem and the ones just trying to take advantage.