He wants to start classes the day after he returns from Burning man, his head is not gong to be into it, unless he is taking anthropology or political science or avant garde theatre or soemsuch where he could parlay his recent experiences into one killer thesis?
BM vs CC?
I know which one I would pick!
I’m a math professor, and I start the first class talking about math. I leave 10 minutes at the end for going over the syllabus. Anything else would be a theft of the students’ time.
@OP: Usually, students who miss the first week of class end up failing. It sounds like tyour brother will definitely end up failing.
Mandatory drop policies as discussed in this thread vary by college. Look in the student handbook for this college’s policy. Individual professors may or may not have the ability to drop no-show students themselves. Again, this varies by college. Contact the registrar and the professors in question.
Yeah, most of my classes were two hours long. Handing out the syllabus and going over that and the course rules never took more than ten minutes. Even if you are teaching hour long courses, you can get in a good lecture in the remaining 50 minutes. And it wasn’t uncommon for the syllabus to be handed out while the professor launched into the first lecture. After all, presumably even community college students can read.
You’d think, wouldn’t you? The first day of class was often painful for me because if it was any sort of class that might fulfill a general requirement as opposed to being for majors, the professor invariably read every single sentence of the syllabus out loud presumably because they couldn’t trust that the students could or would read it on their own.
I lecture and we do lab on day 1. Yes, I catch folks up who join late, but I don’t have a session to give away. If someone contacts me ahead of time I’ll do what I can (syllabus and power points are on the online shell), but the absence from lab counts. Students are welcome to come to office hours to discuss material but I don’t re-lecture. Missing a week is tough, but your best bet is talking to the profs as early as possible. At our college you won’t get withdrawn.
If he’s already a crappy student, maybe skipping out on a week isn’t going to make that big of a deal.
But maybe it will be the one thing that pushes him off the cliff.
I know everyone says that youth is all about taking adventures and having fun. But if he’s already farting around, he doesn’t “deserve” more fun. First, take care of business, graduate, and then reward yourself by doing crazy shit like this.
It’s just a week and maybe it won’t amount to much. But gah, so many people are praying for breaks like your brother has. He needs to shit or get off the pot.
At the CC where I taught, if you didn’t show up for class by a certain date (usually the end of the first week), you were automatically dropped. I didn’t have a choice in the matter and it didn’t matter what your excuse was. Your brother needs to find out if his CC has such a policy.
Even without such a policy, I doubt I’d go out of my way to help him. If he contacted me ahead of time and asked if he could miss the first week to week and a half of class (so 2-3 classes), I’d insist on written proof of the reason. So, now he either has to lie - which I’m going to be watching out for already - or tell me it’s for Burning Man. There is no way I’m making any exceptions for attending Burning Man (for a week and a half!). He could stay in the class (if the school allowed it), but it would be 100% on him to catch up. If he misses an assignment in those missed classes, he better be prepared to take a 0 on that one.
As someone upthread said, it really looks like the choice is Burning Man or skip this semester.
I agree. No sense in paying tuition this semester unless you’re ready to take school seriously. Taking school seriously means that sometimes you have to miss out on things you’d like to do because it conflicts with school.
I wanted my fiance to come with me on a business trip to a very cool location that we both had been looking forward to for months. He was taking classes though and he asked his professor for permission to make up what he would miss. The professor told him no, so he didn’t come with me. It was a bummer, but school was more important.
The first day is usually just handing out and going over the syllabus, “say your name and one thing about you,” etc. I’d commonly skip a class or two the first day in college, and never ran into any problems - there are people adding/dropping classes through the first week anyway.
However, missing EVERY class for the entire first WEEK is a different story. He might very well be able to get it ok’d in advance by all his profs, but successfully playing catch-up from the start in every class is hard work for a good student, doubly so for a lackadaisical one. If he’s not a great student to begin with, I’d tell him to skip Burning Man this year. He’d really be gambling with his tuition dollars if he went.
I’d say whoever’s paying for your brother’s education should stop flushing their money down the toilet.
What are his classes and how soon are the first assignments due? Are any of these classes actually difficult? Burning Man is expensive, so he can probably hire an impostor for that first week for about $100, which is probably a small fraction of his Burning Man expenses. Are the classes large enough that the impostor will not have to wear a disguise? Is he typical looking? This could make a huge difference in the cost.
Every community college class I’ve ever taken would not have been a problem to miss the first week.
That said, he should go to his classes and sell me his ticket.
As a student who battles through disability to get to class sessions even when my joints aren’t working properly or I need strong narcotics to allay the pain, I would be highly angered if there was no consequence for a student who blew off a week and a half of classes to go screw around in the desert. Commit, be there, do the work, be engaged or GTFO.
I had one instructor who read most of the syllabus out loud, with detailed explanations of each provision. It took the full hour and 48 minutes assigned to the class. And she took attendance at the beginning and end (it was otherwise an online class), and then sent out a passive-aggressive (or maybe just aggressive) email to the entire class about the “rude” students who left halfway through, announcing that they would receive no assistance on any issue whatsoever from her until they came in and watched and wrote a report on some video as punishment. Really.
ETA: Most of my classes just ended very early on the first day. Sometimes after only 10 or 15 minutes.