So, I have managed to snag Burning Man tickets for myself and my brother for this year. It’ll be the first time for both of us, we’ve already got a theme camp we’re signed up with, know the people we’ll be camping with, &c. It’s gonna be fun.
However - our mom is freaking out. Brother is a student at the local community college, and has been a lackadasical, part-time student (he’s 24 and is nowhere near his AA degree as far as I know). The Fall semester happens to start the same day as Burning Man starts - 8/27. If he goes to BM, he will miss at least the first week of classes, possibly a week and a half.
What are the chances that he’ll be able to pull this off, and not be dropped from the classes? What should he do to maximize his chances of actually completing the semester?
Contact everyone. Contact the registrar (I don’t know if other colleges call it the registrar, but they are the administrative department who takes care of class placement, etc), contact the instructors of the classes your brother is meant to be taking, contact the dean’s office even. I suggest making this a statement, not a question. Something like:
"Dear [person],
I am unable to attend classes from 8/27-[whenever] due to a family obligation. What do I need to do to make sure I am registered for the correct classes and can make up work missed?"
No-shows on first days are huge candidates for getting dropped. Not showing the first week is a definite get-dropped-for-the-sake-of-a-desperate-graduate-student class opening.
You also miss all the class instructions, explanation of class syllabus, explanation of report format expectations, and a lot of other stuff, up to and including formation of mandatory study groups.
Your only hope would be to contact the professors beforehand, explain about your Aunt’s upcoming surgery and hopefully they’ll let it slide.
First day of class is usually handing out syllabus and briefly going over it. A lot of students are still adjusting their schedules during drop/add week.
Second day of class is always lecture in my experience. I’ve seen students add a class after the second day of class and do ok.
Beyond that missing class is risky. My University has a three missed class policy. They start docking your class grade. It’s University policy and the teacher has to follow it.
Is the community college quarter or semester? If the former he’d be completely fucked, or damn near. Even at my semester college, for some classes, the odds were very high you would be dropped for missing the first day. Like: someone had to die in order for you to stay in the class. Each teacher is different.
Things have changed a lot in the past 25 years. I went to college in the early 80’s. They treated us as adults. They didn’t care whether you attended class or not. We paid our money and if we wanted to throw it away by skipping class it was our loss. You fail the tests and ultimately fail the class. You’re an adult. Make your own decisions and pay the consequences.
I took some night classes three years ago and was shocked at the changes. Its like high school. Roll call first thing. Late for class and miss roll call? That’s an absence. Get too many and your grade is docked.
I think adults should be treated as such. But, I don’t make the rules.
Is your brother in California too? I took a few classes at the local community college here and the general policy was to drop no-shows on the first day. Of course, those were impacted science courses so if he is taking less sought-out classes, he might slide by as long as he e-mails all the professors before the first day of class. If he is missing 2-3 classes however, he should consider himself as good as dropped. Of course, policies might be different across different community colleges, so always check with the registrar and the individual instructors.
I recall my university allowed for a certain amount of overbooking for popular courses in case there were no-shows. It certainly does make sense to drop them off the roster to allow attentive students the chance to attend.
Missing the first week of class isn’t good, but it’s something that a conscientious student can overcome. The bigger problem is that your brother sounds like he’s not that diligent a student - if he’s already slacking, is he actually going to do the work, or is he just going to start out a week behind everyone and just stay there?
If he is in California then it could be a real problem. The ongoing state budget problem is hurting community colleges (and everyone else). I read that San Francisco’s Community College is planning to restrict who can go. Students who plan to transfer to 4 year school have been complaining that they can’t get the classes they need. I haven’t followed the details, so I don’t know how this will unfold for the fall, but yeah it could be a real problem.
CC professor here. I have no attendance policy, so the lack of attendance itself wouldn’t cause points to be docked. However, I am obligated to report no-shows to the registrar by a certain date, and the registrar will drop the student and will not allow re-enrollment.
In my professional experience, students who miss that many classes at the beginning of the semester rarely, if ever, get their shit together enough to be successful in the class. The reason for missing doesn’t seem to matter. Students who start out with a lah-de-dah attitude about class participation never seem to be able to get themselves in a mindset necessary to engage with the material in a meaningful way.
I’m currently in a CC in CA (with 52 credit hours under my belt at this school). Every professor I’ve had will drop no-show students the first day to make room for people trying to add. One professor I had would drop you if you missed any of the first three class meetings.
IME, he’s fucked if he misses the first day. There are too many students, with not enough spaces, and they’ll dump him so someone who cares can get in. I’ve been enrolled in classes that have 30+ people show up trying to add on the first day; it’s positively brutal.
If he’s desperate to go to BM, he could register for Friday, Saturday and internet classes. The school I go to offers Friday and Saturday daytime classes that are structured like night school, in that you only go one day/week and has internet options for a lot of the basic CSU requirements. He’d still get four days of burning man and might have a decent shot at a full school schedule. Also recognize that Fri, Sat and internet classes require a lot of self-disclipine and internet classes require you to attend a first class meeting, so he would need to plan his schedule very carefully.
IMO, it would be terrifically stupid for him to go to BM. If he’s already not a great student, having all his classes jammed into two days and/or internet is a recipe for disaster. I have a 3.9 GPA and I wouldn’t dare tackle that kind of schedule.
Firstly, as long as he’s already actually registered for classes, the registrar has nothing to do with this, and won’t be very interested. Neither will the Dean’s office likely show any interest in the situation.
Both of them will, almost certainly, tell him to contact his instructors and find out what their attendance policies are, and whether they drop students for missing the first week of class.
As an instructor, if i received the email that you suggested, my reply would look something like this:
Dear Student,
Thank you for your email.
Students who miss the first class of the semester will be dropped from the class after the first class meeting in order to make room for another student. The only exceptions to this policy are emergencies or specific incidents covered by the college’s policy on excused absences.
If your family obligation falls into one of these categories, and you can provide appropriate documentation to the effect, you may be allowed to remain in the class despite missing the first week. If you require any clarification of what constitutes an appropriate reason for an excused absence, please let me know.
Yours sincerely,
etc.
In an ideal world, i wouldn’t care too much, and would simply let the student sink or swim according to his own abilities and his own sense of priorities, but…
It’s not just in the CC system; the problems snowball all the way up the chain. I teach at a four-year university in California, and budget cuts over the past few years mean that there is now almost no such thing as a “less sought-out” class. My email inbox is, like those of my colleagues, usually bombarded at the beginning of the semester with messages from students wanting to be allowed to join already-full classes.
Our university’s academic calendar is published over two years in advance. I already know what the first day of class is for Spring 2014. If, in the absence of a dire, last-minute emergency, you can’t drag your ass to the first week of class, you can be damn sure that you’re going to get dropped to make way for someone who bothered to show up.
This might work in some classes, but it depends on the class caps, and also on the capacity of the physical space. If i allowed the class i’m teaching to over-enroll by 15%, there would be students sitting on the floor, and we would be in violation of health and safety codes. Every room in the university has a sheet at the front listing the number of seats and the capacity of the room, and we’re not allowed to exceed those numbers.
More generally, since the budget crunch has essentially frozen pay for faculty in the public university systems of California, and since all faculty in the UC, CSU, and CC systems were hit with furloughs and pay cuts a couple of years back, and since the heads of those systems have continued to play hardball with faculty unions, there are many academics in California (and this is happening in other states, too) who are not especially inclined to take on extra students above the official enrollment caps.
For every extra student i accept into my class, my semester workload increases by four short (1-2 page) papers, 1 longer (8 pages) term paper, 1 mid-term exam, and 1 final exam that i have to grade. And i don’t set multiple choice or scantron or even short-answer assignments. Every piece of written work that i assign has to be read closely, and i am quite conscientious about providing extensive feedback to students on their work. Multiply that by the five or ten students that sometimes want to join the class, and the extra work (for no extra pay) really begins to pile up.
Did you go to a public university?
Even in these straightened economic times, when state support for public education is getting more and more meager, and students are being asked to pay higher and higher fees, the taxpayers of California still pick up more than 25 percent of the cost of each class. Back in the early 1980s, that percentage was closer to 80 or 90 percent. The historic situation, and the current situation, are similar in many American states. So if you blow off your classes at a public institution, it’s not only your own money that you’re throwing away; it’s money provided by your fellow citizens.
I’m a firm believer in public education, and i think that state support for public colleges and universities is a good thing, and i also think that such support should be pushed back up to 1980s levels. But i’m also conscious that as a public employee, i have a responsibility to use the state’s resources as efficiently as i can, within my limited power. And if that means dumping a student who misses the first week of class in favor one who actually bothers to show up, i think it’s the right thing to do, because the student who doesn’t show up is, all other things being equal, more likely to tank the class and end up needing to take it again, at more cost to himself and to the taxpayers.
Huh. I had no idea most colleges have a miss the first day of class and get dropped policy. It certainly wasn’t a thing at my school. (I assume, having skipped exactly 3.5 classes in my collegiate career.)
It looks like one of the consequences of deciding to frolic in the desert instead of going to class might be that it’s assumed that you aren’t that interested in going to class.
I don’t think it was a strict policy at my school either, but there were some instructors who took attendance for the first couple of days even though they didn’t usually care about attendance. IIRC, one of them made it sound like it was mainly a departmental requirement.
But the overcrowding wasn’t as dire as some of the situations described in this thread, either. (I can’t imagine having to deal with that for literally every class. It sounds horrendous.)
Oh, it is horrid. There were times at my CA CC where I’d try to crash a history class. I’d walk in, notice every single seat was taken and a line of students standing next to the wall hoping to add, I’d just walk out.
I think your brother is going to have to decide whether the Burning Man experience is worth skipping a quarter/semester of school (and facing your mama’s ire).
This. I mean I realize the OP’s brother isn’t going to Stamford. But committing to getting an education means that you might miss out on some things.
And really this is a good lesson to learn now that the whole world just doesn’t stop because you want to take time out to go see Burning Man, hit up SXSW, follow Phish around the country, bum around South America or whatever other inane hipster bullshit passes for wasting time these days.
and hopefully they’ll let it slide.