Hacker News Reader

Comment by CamperBob | Hacker News Reader

Quoth the prof: Most risk analysis offers that in the face of substantial uncertainty, you opt for the more conservative path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the professor has an explicit policy for tolerating disrespectful behavior, check with the TA before class, etc.).

Really? I always heard that it was better to apologize later than to ask permission first, at least when you're doing something as harmless as entering a classroom with a lecture in progress.

Galloway sounds like a butthurt nitwit who missed his calling as a librarian. He probably isn't, of course, but he certainly doesn't take the high ground in his response to the student's perfectly civil letter.

It's true that many doors open in the business world when you make a habit of being early, but it's also true that many doors open when you show up someplace where you aren't supposed to be at all.

View on HN

A lot of kids (and they are kids) turn up at third level education (some institutions more than others) with an overweening sense of entitlement. Lessons like this aren't out of place.

Dressing someone down for doing something that is usually tolerated (sampling classes at the beginning of the term) is actually a little out of place in my opinion.

Sampling classes doesn't occur at all schools. I'm an engineer now, but I've taught a few college classes, and having students walking in and out of the lecture is intensely irritating. Maybe it would be better if professors liked being treated like a salad bar, but I understand the sentiment.

On the other hand, I wouldn't write an email like that (because I have better things to do (like argue about that email on Hacker News!)).

I can see how it would be irritating. However, you as a provider of educational service are not entitled to your students' patronage. Without checking to see what else is on offer, how can they make an informed decision about which class they should spend their semester on? Surely you don't expect them to trust their luck.

After the drop/switch deadline, I think this kind of policy would be fine (if a bit draconian).

Without checking to see what else is on offer, how can they make an informed decision about which class they should spend their semester on.

Personally, I would try to drop in on professors' office hours, contact them via email to ask for a quick chat to explain the course, or ask friends for a recommendation. I'm not sure exactly what one can get from 20 minutes of the "these are the books and this is the late policy" kind of stuff covered during the first lecture anyway.

Maybe so. I found that among the professors at my school only a handful had personalities that were at all engaging. The remainder ran the gamut from barely tolerable to completely unacceptable. You can get a sense of that factor in the first lecture.

You can also get a good sense of that factor by asking any person who has ever taken a class from that professor. This achieves the same objective, with a little more work and a little less rudeness from you (or whoever it is in this situation).

That's a good addition to what I said above. As a teacher, I'd be absolutely delighted to help students choose between classes, even if my classes weren't in the running. It's the, "I spent hours preparing this lecture, and now you are walking out in the middle of it," that I don't like.

I can't pretend to have familiarity with the subject taught in this guy's class, but as someone who teaches a subject that requires multi-step derivations, it can be really devastating to have interruptions. I do not have such a policy in my courses, but I can understand why someone might want this.

The autonomy of the instructor and his/her ability to set policies that will ensure the common good in their class is an important cornerstone of academic freedom. People who would complain about this probably don't understand this principle.

> Sampling classes is a relatively new phenomenon

Here's a Harvard Crimson article from 1950 complaining about the slashing of "shopping time" from 2 weeks to 1 (as far as I know it's been 1 week since then). Clearly "relatively" is relative.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1950/5/6/shopping-time-poc...

That would certainly suggest that I'm wrong, at least about how long shopping has been common. But I still don't think it happened everywhere (at least it didn't at my school).

Yale has an officially-mandated "shopping period" described at:

http://www.yale.edu/yalecol/publications/transfer/general/se...

I can't tell if you're expected to drop in on classes in the middle of them or not. I read it as you can sample a large number of non-overlapping classes during the first two weeks of term, and then make an informed decision about which ones to stick with.

Any Yalies around who can add anything?

When you're paying $50+/hour[1], I find a sense of entitlement somewhat justified.

[1] $40k/year / (5 hours/day * 5 days/week * 32 weeks/year)

The 50+ decisive students are paying 50+ times more to be interrupted in order to service the indecision of “xxxx”.

Try asking the students vs asking the prof. I'll give you two guesses to which finds arriving late / leaving early more offensive.

The only sense of entitlement I saw was the professor's. Who's paying who, again?

Well, presumably, there's rather a lot of people paying good money for access to this professor's time and would prefer not to have class disrupted by inconsiderate people coming and going for no good reason.

Being a paying customer doesn't grant an entitlement to be obnoxious while on someone else's property and I can't fathom why you think it would. If you got kicked out a movie for talking on a cell phone during the film, would you call the theater "entitled" and ask who's paying who?

In my experience, these people never actually disrupt the class, only the professor. I don't know why you used an analogy of cell-phone usage; the much more obvious analogue is people who come in half-way through a movie. Do we kick them out? Do you, personally, even get annoyed by such people, or do you just wave it off?

I've always seen this too.

The classes where the prof doesn't make a big deal out of it? The lecture continues. Nobody remembers in 5 minutes, and everyone keeps going. More students pass the class too, as fewer end up annoyed / insulted that their non-laziness is being attacked, while everyone who simply didn't arrive is silently ignored.

The classes where the prof does make a big deal out of it? Lots end up skipping over time, and everybody notices that someone came in because the prof takes time out of class to berate them, causing the prof to lose their (and their students) place in the lecture.

The only "reason" I can see for behavior like that is that the professors are acting childish: they want to get even, at the expense of everyone's time, instead of getting over it.

What you don't see because it is invisible is that you've lost 5-10 minutes out of every hour of lecture time. And you don't realize that you're losing over 10% of the course you paid for because you don't realize what you could have had.

I say this both as someone with a tendency to arrive late, and as someone who has taught classes. Before I tried to write up lesson plans and saw what those interruptions added up to in lost teaching, my sympathies would have been with the student. Now they are not.

And in this you're assuming I'm the one arriving late and witnessing this? I certainly do occasionally, but I'm far from the worst in any of my classes.

As to missing those 5-10 minutes, if they're that valuable, the students will either arrive or miss out. That's their choice. And I wholly feel that way. I'll also point out that many many professors spend those first 5-10 minutes doing very little to progress learning, instead going over the previous class or simply getting ready. Not all, and I'm not accusing you of it, it's just that it's most certainly not the most valuable period in a class.

It's not your job as a teacher to make up their losses, it's your job to teach to the students. If those interruptions are taking teaching time away, it's because you are taking time away to deal with the interruption. That's your choice. All of the most effective lecturers and most valuable classes I've had have been taught by people who kept teaching, because these interruptions don't truly exist unless they're made to exist.

The student comes in late? Then they have to pick up from where they came in. You don't need to point out to everyone that they came in, nor do you need to tell them everything they missed - they'll ask other students (who they likely know) if they're interested. And with two exceptions in my 5 years in college thus far, I've never missed anything in the first 15 minutes that I couldn't pick up in 5 minutes from paying attention from that point on.

Those two exceptions were in art classes, when a demonstration was occurring. They couldn't rewind, and I didn't ask. It instead took me 5 minutes of experimenting and watching someone else go first, and then I was caught up.

If the teacher had made me go first, it'd have been identical to stopping everything just to berate me; it's only purpose would have been to see me fail, wasting class time, which is infantile at best. Sadly, many teachers feel this need.

The students don't know what they are missing. Were you aware that the few minutes at the start of class are the period where students have the best potential for paying attention? It is the place where ideally you should put the most important stuff that you want remembered. Not doing that is a wasted opportunity.

As for your lament that the time is wasted in review, review is actually one of the most important activities in the classroom. If you want long-term retention it is absolutely critical. Of course it is easy to not see the value of doing it.

As for my experience and part of why my attitudes changed, see http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra... for some of my teaching experience, and how I addressed these issues there. My attitudes only changed because I saw first hand how important that time was for learning.

Not that I blame you. When I only had only the amount of educational experience that you do, and like you only from one side of the educational equation, I too did not see how important these things really were. If you are like I was, then you won't understand unless, like me, you wind up experiencing the other side as well and thinking hard.

But even though you haven't experienced it, please pause in your certainty about the world long enough to accept that it is at least possible that, just perhaps, more experience would cause you to change your mind. Just as it changed mine.

> the few minutes at the start of class are the period where students have the best potential for paying attention

Oh, bull. Most are groggy, not thinking about the subject, and far from at their best. If you're an interesting teacher, their attention level goes up with time, not down. Learning in general exhibits a bell-curve-ish shape, not 1/x. Those first few minutes are best spent getting people back into the swing of what they're going to be learning about, starting the rise up that bell.

> time is wasted in review

Not saying it's a waste. Just that it's nothing that can't be picked up later by paying attention in class. That's kind of the nature of reviewing information - it's been covered before. Yes, the beginning is an ideal time to review, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to make up, and by missing you simply can't learn anything that class period (which turning them away does mean). And remember, especially with a berating teacher, the ones that arrive late are the ones who want to learn. If they didn't, it's far simpler to just avoid the class. And interested students effectively come pre-primed for learning.

To sum up, my main point in all this: yes, arriving on time is important. But taking time to berate the student is the interruption, and is easily the least efficient way of dealing with the issue, and the most likely to alienate the student on both the subject and the teacher.

How, precisely, is this productive? It's just cutting them down when the teacher is feeling vindictive. If the teacher isn't aware of this, then they should really start looking at their motivations, because this is how it comes across. Unless they're a "repeat offender", in which case the class is probably on the teacher's side. It's simply downright mean, which is childish, which does nothing to further learning or respect for the teacher.

edit: I read your article, and it sounds like the sort of class I'd like. Most classes fail miserably at retaining info from the beginning, and the three-thirds setup sounds like a really good fit. The homework policy also appeals to me, as on-time is on-time, and very importantly it allows flexibility if needed. As a heads-up however, though frequent Q and A works with some professors, and when it does work it definitely keeps the class more alert, it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution. One of my gen-ed professors would be a perfect failing example of this; he'd end up waiting 10+ minutes for someone to answer his simple question, because everyone was sick of it. But he was hardly an engaging teacher.

If you got kicked out a movie for talking on a cell phone during the film, would you call the theater "entitled" and ask who's paying who?

You want to think that through a little farther. If you got kicked out of a movie for getting up and going to the restroom, would you call the theatre "justified"? Because that's all this student's actions amounted to, at the end of the day.

I doubt anybody even noticed the guy entering and leaving lectures until the good Professor threw a rod.

Could whoever is modding me down please take a moment to explain the difference between the student's actions in this case, and the actions of a student who gets up and goes to the restroom?

I can only give anecdotes to back up my opinions here, but at my university, the most respected professors treated the students like adults, or even better, like customers who have paid a lot of money for a valuable service. These professors are respectful to the students, and they get respect in return. They treat students like the mature adults that they are, and the students act as they should.

Hey, please leave off with the negative stereotypes of librarians...

You know, I struggled with that simile, and it came down to either librarians or priests. :-P Neither one really worked, I agree. Should've gone with "prima ballerina," maybe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com