At first I wasn’t gonna use the naughty word in the title. Then I changed my mind because that’s weak.
So I feel like blogging about something I completely HATE today, because that’s always good times, and the thing freshest in my mind is what my mom was telling me about her students on the phone yesterday.
Mom teaches at an expensive private university, so she doesn’t have too many problems with misbehaved morons, but nonetheless, last week she had to kick three of them out of the classroom because they just wouldn’t shut their damn pieholes.
On the Monday after Spring Break, everyone was rowdy and Mom had to repeatedly tell them to knock it off. So on Wednesday, she started the class with a stern warning that if she had to tell anyone to be quiet, she was going to kick them out.
Not 10 minutes later, and right in the middle of a group presentation by other students, a group of girls in the class were chatting and out of the blue, one of them burst out laughing. Like, loudly. Mom quietly instructed her to leave the room, and the girl got all defensive and said something about not doing anything wrong, but tough shit, sweetheart. Mom made her leave.
At the very next class session, on Friday, again right in the middle of a group presentation, two boys sat there and had a conversation at normal conversation volume. They didn’t even try to whisper or be sneaky, they just sat there and talked as though they were in a bar. Mom stopped the group presentation, asked the guys what they hadn’t understood about “be quiet or get out”, did not receive a satisfactory answer, and made them leave. One of them had the balls to be indignant and strutted out of the room muttering something like see you later.
WTF? How do you get all the way to a private university without having mastered the simplest of social rules, which is that you don’t talk when someone’s standing at the front of the room giving a presentation? Furthermore, how many other teachers and professors had simply put up with this shit from these kids over the years, leading the brats to believe they could always get away with it?
I hated lots of things about college, but I tell you what, loudmouthed assholes were at the top of the list. I had a friend who ended up in one of my classes, and she was a talker, and eventually got called out by the professor for it. Later she whined to me about how mean he was and blah blah, and I asked her why she even shows up for class if she’s just going to talk the whole time. Her response was something along the lines of, “I’m paying for it, I’ll do what I want.”
Oh, bitch. No you did not just say that.
In fact, her dad was paying for it. And second, the rest of us are paying for it, too, and some of us actually want to, you know, learn something, and we can’t do that if she’s sitting there running her mouth about her stupid boyfriend who didn’t call her last night like he said he would! I told her that and she didn’t like me anymore. Mission accomplished.
I know these people and I absolutely feel as you do. I went to a large private university, though, and we didn’t have that problem. Must be a small private university thing. Heh.
They’re doing it in movie theaters, libraries, restaurants, and everywhere else they damn well please, so in class was only a matter of time. We’ve lost all semblance of respect for other people’s enjoyment of public spaces. I would strongly advocate bringing back the right of law-abiding citizens to publicly beat these assholes. There should be a serious and immediate penalty to being this self-absorbed.
Mass narcissism.
I don’t know if it happens elsewhere, but in my Philly suburb with relatively narrow streets, teenagers really, really like to walk down the middle of the street.
AND then get irate when you beep your horn to warn them that you’re coming down the street, in a fucking 7 thousand pond car.
I’d like to show some of these asshats the x-rays of my wife’s leg after three operations and she had the rod put in her leg because she got hit by a car.
5 years on and Scottish Kate is totally disabled.
Your mom rules! I wish our public schools were staffed with people like her.
One of the many joys of “attending” college online. No obnoxious classmates talking while you try to learn. =)
True story. In my sophomore year statistics class, I sat where I always sat – in the back of the room. Turns out the girl sitting next to me was a talker and wouldn’t shut up. I moved to the front of the class the following class period and ended up sitting next another girl, who I began dating and later married. I still can’t stand people who talk when they’re supposed to be quiet, but I suppose they sometimes do serve a greater purpose. My mother used to tell me that everyone’s an example – some are just bad examples.
It’s not just in college. These days with everyone and his brother having a Blackberry, you wouldn’t believe how many professional meetings I attend, in a Fortune 100 company, where many of the executives and managers pay more attention to their Blackberries than they do to the meeting – and sometimes it’s their own meeting!
We held a one day offsite recently – 115 people for an entire day. The facilitator actually started the meeting by asking all the people with Blackberries to just leave them in their bags or turn them off. Want to know how many of these Directors and VPs listened? Less than half.
Pisses. Me. Off.
They’re doing it in churches, too. During Christmas mass a woman let her child babble loudly, drowning out the soft-spoken guest priest who might actually have given a nice sermon but we COULDN’T HEAR IT.
If you have any manners at all, you take your noisy toddler into the space provided for noisy and crying children. That’s why its there.
Church is the only place I’m baffled at what to do. In public, I’m happy to tell people to shut UP. But church??
I’m still a professional student, so I’ve had pretty recent experience with these people. A girl I almost dated nearly dropped a class because a teacher called her out for talking. I was like, “You’re embarrassed? You should be. Don’t talk in class.”
By this point I’d already decided I didn’t want in her pants anymore.
I had a teacher who would throw people out if their phone VIBRATED in class. she had a reputation as a bitch on campus, but I walked out of the class with an A, a pretty good understanding of the subject… and a belief that the people who didn’t like her were just whiny or lazy bitches.
My English junior high school teacher used to toss talkative students into the closet and lock them in there until they behave. If he is still allowed to do that nowaways I wonder if he frisks them for cell phones and blackberries first before booting them into the closet.
you are by far my favorite blogger!!!!!! Sometimes it’s weird how much and how well you can write the things I’m thinking. you’re soooooo Cool. (does that make me sound vain?)
Kudos to Rachel’s mom!
I loathe oblivious talkers. L-O-A-T-H-E them.
Ohhhh, high school band concerts. My daughter was selected to go to the microphone and introduce a song. I didn’t hear a word of it over the jabbering of the 300 pound bovine behind me.
Quiet, thoughtful piece of music interupted by some 30 year old adolescent shouting “Go Marcel!!”
Another nice piece ruined by 40-something shapeless lump mucking around with her digital camera: beep beep beep beep. Thought she would have known better – she was wearing an American Bandmasters sweat shirt.
Idiots, one and all.
And when did the public library become the place where you can just drop off your brood of pre-teens and just leave them there with the run of the place??
Mike Adams (a professor at UNC and a columnist at Townhall.com) called this phenomenon .
One of my law professors once said (after we had asked one too many times if this was going to be on the exam or not, or maybe had asked if we could skip class on Friday or something similar): “Students are the only consumers in the world who want less for their money.”
Rachel, your mom ROCKS. More power to her.
eugh. rachel, my condolences to your mom for having to deal with those little shits. i’m surprised she hasn’t been slapped with a lawsuit for “emotional scarring” because everybody is so fucking sue-happy these days. i swear, i’m pretty sure that 60% of those lawsuits are filed by vindictive people who don’t like getting embarrassed because of their own stupidity, 30% from scientology fanatics who think a piece of dog shit offended them, and 10% are actually real lawsuits over legit stuff. that’s just my theory. but i wouldn’t be surprised if it was true.
Yeah for your Mom! Unbelievable that these brats would think it was OK to talk, and HELLO, this is the person who is giving you your grade? The reason you are going to college right?
I mean it’s one thing to talk in class (yes, disrespectful to everyone there, but sometimes people make mistakes) But being snotty when called on it is just extra dumb.
Sadly, this started in kindergarten for most of these kids when it was decided they needed to be “empowered”, singing songs such as I am Special (to the tune of Frère Jacques.) Somewhere along the line, teachers began to figure out they would not be supported by parents if they tried to deal with behavior issues for these “special” children, and many of them simply gave up. Wish there were more teachers like your mom, Rachel.
True story: when my college sophomore daughter was in Girl Scouts in second grade, I received a call one day from the troop leader. Seemed while the assistant troop leader read aloud, several scouts — one of whom was my daughter — chatted and laughed pretty much the entire time. I told my daughter she needed to write a note apologizing to the assistant, and she did. Later, the troop leader confided that, out of 10 girls, only my daughter and one other girl apologized. The parents of the other girls thought it was unreasonable to expect an apology and suggested maybe the assistant was a ‘boring’ reader.
I’m all for instilling self-esteem … right along with manners and a sense of boundaries.
@ Chris:
Attention Surplus Syndrome — LMAO!
In the job I have now I have met some of the rudest people on the planet and they come from many different countries. I understand those who translate to their friends or families, that’s not a problem. I can even tolerate a bit of the gabbing as long as it’s not so loud that no one else can hear me but what blows me away is when I’m giving information and one of those who was flapping their gums the entire time asks me a question I had just gone over not 15 seconds before. I usually do my best to embarrass the crap out of them by asking the rest of the people who were paying attention if they might be able to answer that question for the douche bag.
But what irriates me more than all that is when some twat gets on his/her cellphone, (more often than not it’s a guy), and carries on a conversation during the 30 minute tour. And they say the same thing, “I paid for this, I’ll do what I want.” At that point I advise them that so did everyone else and if he/she would like to reimburse everyone for the price of their tickets, we would be more than delighted to listen to their conversation instead.
And if they get a phone call during the tour and answer it, I’ll harass them the entire time. “Is that for me? I’ve been waiting on a call. Can I talk to them? Don’t let my tour interrupt your phone call..” With that and the reaction of the others on tour, it usually gets them off the phone in a hurry.
You ask how they made it to private college with such ill manners….you need to look no further than the parents. In all of these cases, it was never a kid it was always the parent acting rudely. Since kids mimic adults, it’s no wonder where they get it from.
Holy crap yes. These people should be melted in place as an example to others.
I was in concealed carry class this weekend to renew. A woman, who was also full of obnoxious stories about what she heard about state X’s laws and our instructor was wrong on this or that and how her husband’s father was pushed around by some others state’s PD and blah and blah and blah, took a call near the end of class. My wife and I both mentioned to each other afterwards that the officers smacking her family around was most likely karma.
Somebody needs to gift karma some sharks with frick’n lasers.
My senior year of h.s. (1984), I had a typing class, trying to fill out the required electives. I used to sit next to one of the varsity baseball jocks in the typing class, actually a pretty nice guy but he was a non-stop flirter with the chicks. The teacher would be talking and if the jock was flirting/talking, the teacher (also served as one of the baseball coaches) would pick up a black board eraser and whip it at his head. All of a sudden “whap” a big white cloud of dust as the eraser bounced off his noggin. Funniest damn thing.
Can I have a cup of that? Initially, I couldn’t read past the title I was laughing so hard.
And the rules of polite society continue to degrade as people look to animals as justification for their behavior. If they can explain Spitzer’s hooker fetish by saying that other mammals (like baboons and camels) are not monogamous, then it should be easy to look at chimps and dolphins as justification for discussing American Idol in the middle of English class.
What ever happened to being and following the rules of polite society?
I have a method to deal with people who are carrying on loud conversations in public, either on the phone or with another person, about health issues or private matters like their boyfriend is a dick etc.
I just jump right into the conversation and offer my opinion. Everyone is entitled to my opinion. “You know the best thing for those bleeding hemorrhoids is blah blah blah. I had that problem once and blah blah blah” “Your boyfriend sure does sound like a dick…you should blah blah blah.” Usually they stop and stare at me amazed by my rudeness… I say..”What??!!?? I thought you were sharing. After all everyone in the place is getting to hear you in great detail. You aren’t sharing??? How about you keep your conversations private then?” Meanwhile my husband is cringing in his seat or walking slowly away from me.
I’ve been known to turn around in restaurants and tell screaming snotty kids to “SHUT UP!!” The parents are astounded. I once got a round of applause from the rest of the people in the restaurant. Stood up and took a bow.
Lots of fun.
I dunno. However, I teach part time at a local university and sometimes I get saddled with the biggest asswipes you’d ever want to meet. One time, a student’s cell phone went off in the middle of class. Most students turn off their phones and apologize for having not turned off the ringer. No big deal; I’ve done the same thing. Not this girl, though. She actually answered the phone and started having a normal volume conversation. While sitting in the front row. I said, “If it’s for me, tell them I’m busy right now.” She looked offended that I’d had the temerity to say anything, but she did get up and walk out of the classroom to finish her call.
It seems to me that we’re raising a generation of narcissitic assholes, convinced that, much like Zaphod Beeblebrox, the universe was created to revolve around them. Maybe, just maybe, someone should have said the word “no” to them once in a while.
Amen sister. Seriously, reach out and smack someone. The arrogant little bastards need to be kicked out, then expelled, then daddy’s lawyers show up with a lawsuit or a big check and they are back the next day. It ain’t right.
I went to a private secondary school and the food was appalling – we all just put it down to being part of the parcel that came with being packed off to school.
I remember, when I was about fifteen, wanting to punch a snotty little spoilt thirteen year-old when she told the kitchen staff that she thought the food was shit and ‘Should be better because we pay for it.’
And while I’m punching people, I will add people in classes, people who talk in picture theatres (please explain that to me?) and those rude farkers who cluster in supermarket aisles and talk.
One day in math class, back in high school, a new transfer student arrived… a rather attractive blonde girl. Well, that caused one of my classmates, Scotty, to just start acting like the biggest goofball of all time, so much did he want to attract her attention. Our teacher, Mr. Gilmore, said: “Scotty, since you like being the center of attention so much, you can come right up here and stand on top of my desk.” Made him do it, too. Scotty spent the next 15 minutes standing on the teacher’s desk in the front of the classroom, with his head poking about 3 inches up through the ceiling tiles.
I once tutored a student with a bluetooth headset, and he would start talking to someone else while I was talking to him. It was odd to say the least.
In college, I had one class where one kid constantly came in late. Every day, he’d walk into this classroom 10 minutes after it started. After a month, the prof got sick of it–at this college, teachers can’t kick out the students or lock the doors, so he put a lab table in front of the door. The kid had to force the door open, to the accompaniment of screeching. He was never late to that class again.
Can we add people who sing along at concerts? I mean for every song, not the occasional one where audience participation is invited. With what concert tickets go for these days, I don’t need some mouthbreather who couldn’t make the (apparently very low) cut for American I-dull sitting behind me and drowning out the artist I paid to see and hear.
This semester I have a class with 4 or 5 jerks out of 20.
This is most unusual, given my imposing persona.
Rolled their eyes when they didn’t like my criticisms of education. [They are teachers.]
“Hey, whyn’t you just be proficient at teaching kids to read, and not worry about self-esteem? No one hired you as a therapist.”
Whined at the start and end of class about the amount of work.
“You give us too much to dooooooooo.”
[I expected papers that were longer than one page, containing at least one sentence signifying sentience.]
I chewed them out the way I did when I was in the Army and some recruit was blabbing in ranks.
“You wanna shut up, Gingivitis, before I take you behind the barracks?”
[Oh, I’m soooooo tough.]
Two days later, the dean calls me in and says that she received 2 emails saying I had said things that were “offensive.”
I said, “I chewed ’em out. They’re all adults. Nothing offensive except if you’re a blabber mouth.”
She said, “Offensiveness is defined by the victim.”
[I thought, Christ on a bike, when did we leave Kansas? Does she get it that I could now say that she is offending me? Apparently, this level of logic is out of reach.]
Said she was going to “investigate” to see if a charge of “harassment” applied—that I had created a “hostile environment.”
I said, and I quote, “If this investigation of yours takes ONE step out of this office, there will be so many lawyers in here suing you that it will be standing room only.”
Never heard another word.
Might be the new persona.
The class is now calm and submissive, as per Cesar Millan.
I’m not sure how Rachel feels about people embedding images in her comments, so I’ll just instead… :)
At least your mom can kick them out. I teach in a public high school and for the most part, kids are Teflon Dons, you can’t say or do much about their crap anymore.
I don’t know what it is about cell phones that makes people act like A-holes, but act like A-holes they do. I just *luuuuuuuved* it when I was working retail, and customers would approach the counter while yakking on their phones, carrying out the whole transaction while acknowledging my presence with the same level of respect they usually reserved for vending machines. Charming.
Except, now I know how it happens. I caught myself doing the same thing last year during a particularly trying time. I stopped the conversation, apologized to the clerk, and explained that I had been at the hospital with my mom all day, and was just trying to order my dinner before the sandwich shop closed. He was very gracious and said he really appreciated my apology, as most people didn’t bother.
Part of the problem with this sort of asshatery is that there are people (like me) who really can’t hear easily through a bunch of background noise. If I’m trying to pay attention, it’s very wearying to have to strain and strain and strain to hear what I’m trying to hear, through a buzz of mindless chatter.
I went to a private college myself..however, I was smart enough to have my employer pay for it. I was raised in the military..father ended his careers as a Command Sargeant Major..so..you can probably figure I had a stern upbringing..appreciated every little thing I got. I was privileged to go to the college that I did..but..it was 13 years after I graduated highschool..with family in tow..when I went back to school..so..Like I said..I didn’t pay for it..but was very appreciative that I got such a quality education. There were assholes like this in every one of my classes. This school actually had private boat ramps..and these freakin snots didn’t get it! While I’m appreciative of the education…I could barely make it through the classes cuz of these dickheads.
Anyway..I just found your blog! You are probably one of the funniest people I’ve read and spot on with your assessments…you’ve made my blogroll!
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i’m one step beyond y’all, i can’t even stand it when these pompous a-holes talk at ‘appropriate’ times, i.e. after they’ve raised their hand and been called on. the big thing in education theory these days is ‘discussion,’ because god knows why you would want to hear your professional teacher’s lesson when you can listen to the deep innermost thoughts of the nineteen year old asshat next to you, am i right? the fancy private schools all have round table setups now to make it even easier to hear your classmates’ idiotic opinions, while the tenured professors are reduced to the role of conversation facilitator. and, being weak liberal gunless pussies (but i repeat myself), the teachers are horrible facilitators, so the pompous arrogant kids hijack every discussion and just spend all class spewing hot air. all of which leads me to my point, which is that y’all should check out my very favoritest facebook group of them all, “Keep Your Fucking Hand Down in Lecture and Shut Up. No One Cares.”
Used to have the SAME problem in school. Hated it then too.
and this was in a Private School AKA “Christian” school.
Those kids were worse than the kids in public school.
and they wonder why I do not want kids?
I do a lot of public speaking about computer stuff. I’ve addressed groups as small as one person and as large as 3,000. Totally different dynamics as you go from ones (a conversation) to tens (storytelling) to hundreds (lecturing) to thousands (performing). You can mix these elements, e.g. bring storytelling to a lecture, but you must always honor the primary dynamic. If you’re in front of 1,000 people, you’d better be entertaining. If you’re in front of one person, you’d better spend half the time listening.
Audiences of around 100-200 seem to be the most vulnerable to bad manners. Smaller groups are generally very polite (because they’re less anonymous), and the handful of assholes in larger groups don’t really matter because they’re drowned out by the PA system. But with a medium-sized group, one loudmouth is a real distraction.
I don’t get such people very often, but it’s important to have a strategy to deal with them so you don’t get flustered. Key things to remember in today’s edition of Jeff’s Free Advice:
(1) The audience is on your side. That’s why they showed up for your talk.
(2) Nobody likes an awkward moment. Confronting a talker is awkward, but pretending he’s not there is even more awkward. The audience wants you to make him stop.
I employ three levels of confrontation to deal with it:
DEFCON 3: I stop speaking, clasp my hands behind my back, and wait patiently for the person to stop talking — looking at him bemusedly the entire time. The audience is relieved — that I noticed, that I’m going to deal with it, and that it’s not too awkward.
DEFCON 2: I say: “Excuse me. I apologize for interrupting.” The audience chuckles. “I don’t mean to be rude. But if your conversation can’t wait, please continue it outside.” It’s a little bit awkward, but humor breaks the tension and prepares the audience for what’s coming next.
DEFCON 1: I say a very loud: “Yo!” Pause. “It’s time to make a choice. Shut the fuck up or get the fuck out.” Applause. Every single time.
And the surprising part? The guy invariably stays — and keeps quiet.
I retire this Summer and begin classes at the U of L, in the Fall. Nothing I’m reading here is giving me a warm-fuzzy about what I’m going to experience as a veteran-student.
Are there any readable college-survival guides out there ? I’m looking for a title like:
” How To Avoid Choking The Shit Out Of The 19-Year Old Next To You In Class.”
Any suggestions ?
I am a part-time instructor. I have 25 students in my class. Usually, about half show up for the class. You’d think that with tuition as high as it is, they’d want to get their money’s worth, but I guess not.
Oh yeah, and I forgot about this one…
My kid brother got into some trouble in high school, and ended up graduating 2 years late from one of those “second chance” programs. You can imagine that, by that point, those kids had overcome more than the usual odds to get to graduate. At their graduation ceremony, the kids were pretty civilized, by the behavior of the “adults” and other audience members was absolutely appalling!!! They talked among themselves while the ceremony was in progress, sometimes wandering across the bleachers to do it. They left to get sodas or take smoke breaks and wandered back in. Young children were not made to sit still; they climbed and ran around in the back of the auditorium. Anyone who wondered what those kids were doing in second chance– need have looked no further.
And this was in 1995.
I had a professor once who told us that if anyone’s cell phone went off in class they would have to stand up and sing the ring tone (or pick a song if we didn’t have a musical ring tone).
We all laughed and thought “Yeah right, he’s just kidding”. But sure enough, when someone’s cell phone went off during the third week of the semester he stopped his lecture and told them to get up and sing.
Everyone made sure to turn off their cell phones after that.
Back in the 70s, my Calculus Professor chucked an eraser at a guy who was talking in class one day. This moron stood up, stared at the large white chalk mark on his chest and asked the prof “What’s up?”
The professor answered “Someone is paying a lot of money for you to be here. The least you could do is pretend to be paying attention.” Then he turned back to the chalk board.
The moron took about three steps forward towards the prof and this 70 year old man, whipped around, and nailed him right in the face with another eraser, from about 20 feet away.
The moron ran out of the room, covered in chalk, while the rest of us sat there laughing hysterically. The prof looked around rather sheepishly and said “Well, that was kind of fun, wasn’t it?” And continued on with his lecture.
The moron never came back to that class.
A few random comments:
I took an evening math class at one of our local universities, and at the first session, the prof explained his grading system, and how it was based on a mix of quiz scores, major exams, and attendance. For the quizzes, he would drop the top two and bottom two scores and average the rest. The kicker was, he’d start each class with a ten-minute quiz. Tardiness wasn’t much of a problem.
I was at a Barnes and Noble, sitting at about the middle of their long counter which looked out on the parking lot. Some Young Master of the Universe sat down at the end of the counter and opened his laptop. After a few minutes he got on his cell phone and started pacing up and down the counter while he spoke loudly and proudly about some kind of business transaction, occasionally stopping behind me. After my usual method of saying BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! as he passed by didn’t work, I started pacing myself. Every time he paced to my end, I got up and stood at his spot, reading the document displayed on his laptop. In my company, leaving company information exposed like that is a serious security violation. Must have been for him, too, because he decided to protect it by sitting down in front of it.
Another side of the cell phone and clerk-to-customer interaction. I occassionally am standing at a counter to buy something and have the clerk yammering away on a cell phone in the middle of the transaction, just ringing up my purchase without even any eye contact. When they say “That’ll be $8.97,” I just stand there with my money in my hand until they address me directly, and usually impatiently repeat the “$8.97” I replay, “Oh, were you talking to me? I thought you were still on the phone.” Don’t know that it changes any behavior, but it makes me feel better.
Rachel,
I would like to read this entry to my chemistry class, if it’s OK with you. Then I am going to start kickin’ asses!
My Drill Instructor never had that problem.
I guess your mom can’t keep them on Parris Island for a few more weeks, or make them do push ups until she gets tired of watching.
She should pass out information about her grading system at the beginning of class and make them sign it, along with their parents. Mandatory reduction of one letter grade for interrupting the class. Ejection if it happens a second time. Then enforce it.
The parents won’t complain. Just print how much they are paying per hour of classroom instruction on that letter.
IIRC, I paid roughly $6000 a semester for my daughter to go to Penn State (out of state rate.) At 5 classes per semester, say 3 hours a week of instruction, a 12 week semester would be 180 hours of instruction – round up to 200 just to make the math simple. I paid $30 an hour for her to be in class. That’s at a public school, and it doesn’t count room and board or books or fees.
Not too many parents want to see their kid waste that kind of money.
I don’t know what happened to the rest of my comment last night….the mind boggles.
But, as a high school teacher who works very hard to teach kiddos how to play nice with others, I LOVED your mom’s response to the rude-children. Get ’em!!
I just read this 5 days ago. It’s a commentary about this exact topic from an active professor.
Standing ovation to your mother – I wish she had been my math teacher in college. I was weak in math and ended up in the most basic class available.
My dullness with numbers, a teachers aide who barely spoke english and 3 “tools” who enjoyed running their mouths the entire class left me no choice but to ask the TA to step up and take control.
Unlike these 3 douchebags (I’m assuming now) I was paying for college out of my own pocket. The TA tried once or twice and then gave up after being laughed at.
With no extra $$$ for a tutor I hung in as long as I could but fell so far behind that I ended up walking from the class.
I’m 46 and that happened when I was 20 and I’m still ticked that I didn’t take matters into my own hands – thinking about it now I’m betting I would have had the support of a few other struggling math students.
What about the folks sitting behind you at concerts, talking at a volume that allows them to carry on a conversation (while the band plays) about their day at work…..
I’m of two minds on this.
I find the rudness of the talkers to be unbearable at times–and I am a person who isn’t afraid to tell them to shut up.
On the other hand I find that institutions of higher learning seem to misunderstand their actual relationship with their students.
They are a service industry. The students are paying them for a service. The students are the de facto ’employers’ of the teachers. Without the students the teachers have no jobs.
Yet rather than provide the direct service–i.e. teaching the student what he/she needs to know to move forward in the career they’ve chosen, higher education demands that students pay top dollar for a series of classes that are required–despite the fact that they are unrelated to the course of study needed for the chosen career.
This results in resentment. Which often leads to students doing the minimun to pass these useless ‘required’ classes while trying to live thier lives while having some ‘required’ class proffesor drone on about things they’ll never need.
Perhaps if these classes were taught on the extremely cheap–or dropped altogether, we’d have students paying attention as well as tens of thousands of dollars.
Wow Jack, how has your first year of college been? Good, bad, indifferent?
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear, you are not paying for a service, your parents are.
And judging by the last three paragrahs, you fail to understand that those electives are there to boost your overall GPA when your advanced classes start to tank it & maybe teach you a thing or two.
And second, employers don’t give two shits whether you majored in economics or English. They’ll look at your grades and judge your intellegence and work ethics based off of them. You’ll also be judged based on doing things you didn’t like, which is essentially going to be your first job or two anyway. And the bare minimum won’t cut it there either.
Brad, I’m long out of college–which I, and not my parents, paid for. My daughters are the ones who’ll be paying for useless courses next. Or me..probably me. But what does it matter whether it’s the student or the parents paying? Either is paying thousands for classes that have nothing to do with the career the student has chosen.
And the idea of having students sit through and pay for couses they’re not going to need is just absurd. To pad out the GPA? How about letting them take classes that they need, in the course of study that they’ve chosen, succeeding or failing in that–instead of masking insufficiencies with good grades in nonsense classes?
If I or my kids is paying forty thousand dollars a semester I want them taking classes that will advance them on their path to their chosen career–not fluff classes designed more to keep educrats employed than to impart any actual useful knowledge.
Hey, Brad, you wouldn’t happen to BE one of those educrats, would you?
I’m with Jack. I sat through a lot of this sort of general-ed BS…(it took me nine years to get through college because I changed my major so many times.) I’m actually feeling a little guilty, because I was one of those offending students. I didn’t talk on the cellphone in class (they weren’t prevalent until I’d graduated college) but I did a lot of coming in late and leaving early. I guess I never realized how disruptive I was being…just figured nobody cared.
Most of the posts here seem to sympathize with the aggravated prof or fellow students being upset with the “rude” student on the cellphone or whatever. I see a lot of this sort of chatter over at Dr Adams’ column at townhall.com.
Reading these reminds of the time I was taking a complete BS civics course at the junior college, before I transferred up to the university. This professor, something of an asshole to start with, threw a student out of class…for reading a newspaper. A newspaper! I think he threw me out the following week for doing homework from another class while listening to his lecture. And he wasn’t polite about it either time, either. It was like, “PUT THE NEWSPAPER DOWN! I’M NOT GOING TO WARN YOU AGAIN! IN FACT, JUST GET OUT!” Like us “nineteen year-old asshats” were four or something.
I mean, come on. Reading the paper? I can see talking on a phone or chatting with your neighbor, but reading? That’s disruptive?
I concur with Jack’s other point: the students are customers, not slaves or a captive audience. Teachers may find lack-of-attention (such as reading a newspaper) to be “disrespectful,” but let’s get real. This is an ego trip, not a matter of respect. As long as the offending student isn’t disturbing the instructor or his fellow students, I say leave him alone.
Professor gets paid either way, doesn’t he? Students get out of their education what they put into it…if they fail, at least they can’t blame the teacher if they weren’t paying attention in class.
As a part time Engineering professor, I can relate. The first day of class, I lay down my preferences. 1) do not call me Dr. H., because I do not have a PHD, just an MS and 27 years of real world experience. 2) Call me Professor H., because that is who I am. 3) Say nothing else unless called upon or acknowledged. It works well, after the intial shock wears off. This is at a good sized private University ($35k room, board, and tuition a year).
I want to ask a question not specifically related to your topic, but more along the lines of blogging in general.
How do you go about setting up a blog page like yours? What’s the process…what are the steps to getting set up and running?
This is something I want to do, but just don’t even know where to start! Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
if you arent paying attention then why are you there? i sure dont want you in my class if you refuse to participate…