Those people in my Intro to Sociology class got a chance tonight for 5 extra point on their final grade.
That’s right, final grade. Not test grade, not final exam, final grade. Meaning that I could conceivably get a 70 overall and pass.
All we/they had to do was attend a lecture-type thing on “public intellect”. 7:30-9:00. But they were only required to stay for an hour.
I’ve got no problem with someone sitting in the back and quietly leaving after an hour. Respectful, and you can get on with the rest of your life without making abig fuss. I sympathize with those of you who had to work late and were forced to leave without getting to hear Margaret Meade’s daughter talk a whole lot.
However. Getting word that it’s okay to leave is NOT an excuse for 75 of you to loudly get up, rush out the back door WHILE someone’s talking (and while you’re talking to eachother about how Thank God this thing is over and you were close to fallinh asleep), then loudly discuss things in the foyer to the side, or shout to your friends inside, or fuck around, or whatever. You want to horse around? Do it where you won’t be disrespecting the people who took time out of their day to talk to a bunch of college students (and some older people) about what a public intellect is.
Get a fucking clue, please. I don’t care if you take a class and get a credit for learning what some of us learned back in fucking elementary school, or if you have to do it this summer as part of a community service project wherein you learn how not to be a disrespectful little fuckcharm, or you get it by learning the hard way, with someone who won’t take the kind of immature shit you pulled tonight.
You give your fellow students a bad name by pulling this stunt. Yeah, you were required to be there for an hour. Don’t like it? You didn’t have to show up. It wasn’t required. But there’s no reason you can’t be polite and quiet as you leave WHILE one of the speakers is talking. At least have the common courtesy to let the rest of us hear the man (which we couldn’t until that crowd was well out of the room).
You embarrassed your class, your peers and your school tonight.
Fuckcharm is my new favorite word. I once attended a lecture given by Noam Chomsky at Harvard. Fer Chrissake he’s Noam Chomsky who wouldn’t want to hear him speak. Vast numbers of student’s started to leave as the lecture ate into their Friday night. Noam was getting visibly agitated - finally blew when one girl dropped her books on the way out. To paraphrase “Everyone who wants to leave do so NOW if not show some fucking respect.”
While your classmate’s behavior was reprehensible, I would really like to know what your sociology prof was thinking in telling them they only had to be there for an hour.
The least he could have done is set how long they had to be there by the N[sup]th[/sup] break. If there was only going to be one break, then everyone had to make it through to then.
How is the Prof going to be verifying folks were there?
Can I hope for a paper on what was presented to get the 5 points?
This is the most crass display of insensitivity I’ve yet to witness in students, and usually a major blow to the speaker’s ego. It amazes and embarrasses me that anyone could have the balls to get up and leave in the middle of a lecture. During one Astronomy class, one of the TAs gave a lecture in place of the professor. This guy was clearly not used to public speaking, and his subject material was somewhat irrelevant to what we had been learning before. Throughout the entire lecture, people kept getting up and leaving the hall. I winced every time I heard the door squeak open, and I was on the other side of the hall from the exit. I sat through the entire lecture, and was grateful to see that more people stayed than I’d thought at the end.
I have no idea. I personally would have rewarded the people who actually stayed for the whole thing by giving them extrap points for, if nothing else, sitting through the entire thing. But that’s just me.
But who, WHO, cannot take half a fucking hour out of their day to listen to intelligent people talk about representing the voice that cannot be heard? I mean, isn’t that what college students are? [sub]no? okay . . . [/sub] Seriously, though . . . half a fucking hour. That’s all it would have taken and they wouldn’t have disrupted the entire thing.
There weren’t any breaks. Seriously; they weren’t needed. Things went on rather smoothly and quickly, though I would have loved to hear more from Meade’s daughter. And I found out that Harvard students and professors are left-wing, which I didn’t know before. No word yet on Dartmouth, though;)
We had to sign a paper and put our SSN (which is also our PIN) on same sheet. So technically someone could sign for a friend, but that’s slime I don’t want to think about (unless you have work, in which case the prof was willing, I think, to exchange something else for the lecture).
Not from me . . . I woke up at about 5 this morning, and though the whole thing was very interesting any paper I wrote would be about 50 percent BS. The basic surmise of thought was that public intellects are something special and we shouldn’t suppress them.
riley: glad to see you like my word. I think I saw it somewhere before . . . but who can be sure? Works, though:)
I can tell you one thing–he won’t be telling hte next crop of students they only have to stay for an hour. Your prof is going to get so much shit for this, it will haunt him for the rest of the year. Becasue in the end it is not the students who look bad, it is the faculty, and it is the faculty who had to attend the mixer afterwards and hope to God the speaker dosen’t bring the mass exodus up. Make sure to go to your next class–you are likely to hear one hell of a rant (although you may well find the whole class punnished for this in some form, since he can’t be sure who left early and who didn’t. I would expect a really really hard final and no more mercy on late assignments and such.)
Well, Manda, I guess the good thing is there are only exams, not papers. However, I guess I should be expecting El Asshardo Examo, huh?
And if he does give us a purposefully hard exam you can bet you hair on your head I’ll raise hell about it. I see no reason my academics should suffer because some pricks decided to have fun rather than gasp learn something interesting.
As for the next crop of students . . . something about this class tells me this behavior is the norm. You don’t get a lot of dedicated students in level 100 classes. For example, my psych 100 class, when we were expecting exams back and didn’t get them you’d frequently see over 1/3 of the class walk out. That simply would not happen in my ab psych class. Never mind that the teacher is jacked (And hot! Hoo boy). In the higher-level classes people tend to care more.
The fun thing about this lecture is that there were six speakers. Six POVs about this. It was really interesting except for the fact that I was dead-tired (going on fumes right now).
Iampunha, he is totally wihtin his rights to give you a more diffucult exam because of this debacle. Obviously, he can’t ask questions on materials never covered or expect you to answer 500 questions in an hour or anything like that–the sort of thing you could raise holy hell about. But there is a range of ‘acceptable’ diffuculty, and I am assuming that the sort of Prof who would be willing to give everyone 5 pts on the final grade for attending a 90 min lecture would normally give tests on the “easy” catagory. After this I would expect him to tend towards “diffucult”. Frankly, it is what I would do–giving credit for attending lectures and such is a way of saying “I am mostly concerned about you being engaged with the subject matter and thinking about things and generally interested, and if you do that I promise not to sweat the trivia.” By demonstrating that they are not, in fact, interested in the material or thinking about things, but are,in fact, only concerned with grades, well, that means that you have to go back to evaluating them on the standards grades were meant to measure—objective knowledge learned.
What I meant about the next crop of students is that he will be sure to tell them that they have to stay the whole time and that if he sees anyone behaving inappropriatly they will not get credit. It is a shame you have to tell legal adults these things, but apparently you do, and I don’t think it is a lesson he will forget.
I was thinking maybe at the hour mark they’d wait to see who left, and then everyone who stayed would find out that the whole point of the lecture was to discuss something obtuse like “shirked social responsibilities” or something like that that would be directly related to people in society fulfilling just the absolute minimum amount of work required to do what was needed to be done and not going the extra effort that’s required to be a good member of society, or something like that.
(hijack)
Actually, the wingedness of the faculty depends on which party is in the White House. During the Regan-Bush years, all the right-wingers took positions as advisors, and all the left-wingers remained on campus. I got to watch it swing to the right during my junior year as Clinton replaced Bush and all the left-wingers went to Washington while the right-wingers came back to teach. I expect the Lenin statues have been re-erected in Harvard Yard by now.
(/hijack)
Anyway, Vladimir Brovkin, my old Russian History prof., never hesitated to stop his lecture and let fly with a few (or more) choice words whenever someone acted this rude in class. By the second week, they learned to either behave themselves or not bother showing up. God, he was great.
For what it’s worth, these must be the same kind of people who, once they leave school, do the same kind of things in business meetings and training courses.
I used to teach training courses for a business and the number of people who didn’t have the courtesy to leave a room quietly during the training was amazing. Not to mention the cellphone calls that were just too important to take outside and had to be dealt with then and there.
And don’t even get me started on the idiots who would open the door in the middle of my talk and say, “'Scuse me, Spoons,” and then direct themselves to somebody in the room: “Hey, Bob, are we still on for lunch?”
Based on your post, iampunha, at least I now know that these people come from a long tradition of being rude to the speaker and disruptive to those who are there to learn. Disrespectful fuckcharms indeed! (Nice word, by the way.)
I hope for your sake that the prof has some kind of caveat–something like, “You get five points for staying an hour, [whispers]* but ten points for staying for the entire lecture*.” Or perhaps he will have a question dealing with what the speaker talked about after they all left.
At any rate, if you can manage to sit through such things even though you can leave, you sound like the kind of person who will do well when you finish school. You’d do well in the training courses I did anyway. But I can’t say the same for the people who are as you described.
Just want to echo Spoons’s comment-- these clods will do these things beyond college. The graduate school I work for has what you could call a semi-formal commencement ceremony each year-- as in, no caps & gowns (they get to wear those at the main university event that morning), no processional, just a fairly relaxed event where everyone’s name gets called and you don’t get lost among Columbia’s other thousands of grads.
However.
My routine assignment used to be ushering the ceremony-- which would inevitably devolve into “guarding the doors to keep them from slamming because of all the inconsiderate pricks who keep wandering in and out.” Some of these people, as soon as “their” grad’s name is announced, turn the back of the auditorium into Grand Fucking Central Station. They go out, they come back in, they chat in groups, they ask loudly where the phones are, they make calls on their cell phones *in the back of the room, * not outside it. Complete and total lack of respect for any of the grads, as far as I can see, considering that their behavior is probably an embarrassment to the loved one they came to see.
The capacity of some people for sheer rudeness just amazes me sometimes.
I went to a public lecture on plasm physics one time. A clipboard was passed around, and as the students in the row ahead of me signed their names, they mentioned how great it was that they were getting credit for just showing up for their engineering course.
They’d made a bunch of flash cards and were studying for an exam before the lecture started, which is fine. But once the speaker started, they didn’t put the flashcards away! They continued quizzing each other in whispers for the entire lecture!
I was apalled. I wanted so bad to lean forward and say, “Excuse me, it’s fine if you don’t care about this, but other people do want to hear it, so shut the hell up!” But I was a froshling, and timid, so I just glared.
Another tip for morons who were raised by wolves: if you know you’re going to have to leave early, sit on the aisle. Preferably in the back. Now I know that this defies all logic, but maybe you can make up a cute little mnemonic to help you remember, m’kay?
What kind of dipshit walks out on Noam Chomsky, for fuck’s sake?
While I’ve never walked out on Noam Chomsky, I have wanted to every time and only politeness keeps me there.
The man is just, in my opinion, a horrible speaker. His books are interesting (though full of stupid ideas), but listening to him in person is just excruciating. One time I was lucky enough to get shunted into an overflow room where we watched on close circuit TV. Listening to him while reading a book was much easier.
As for the incident described, I find it appalling that a professor is giving out grades without a requirement of learning something. Now, this is a common practice, but it still stinks. My favorite was my one psych class I took in college. You could earn up to 40 extra points (out of 100) by acting as subjects in studies for grad students. Now, I understand that grad students need people to practice on, but I am being rewarded with grades (which are supposed to signify learning) for activities that involve no learning. Combine this is simple grade inflation and it is no wonder that the average grade in most university classes is 3.3.
If I were that professor, I probably wouldn’t make the overall exam a whole lot harder, but you can bet there’d be a question on it drawn from the discussion of the last half hour of the lecture.
One tiny little note, not that it matters a helluva lot.
The prof wasn’t there. One of the TA people was there. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told the prof that.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Qs about the lecture on the exam except that the prof said there wouldn’t be b/c not everyone could make it.
Manda, I understand he’s within his rights, but I don’t see that I and the others who stayed really should be given a more difficult test for what others out of our control did. I mean, I don’t think it’s really fair to expect us to control them.
