Some professors threaten to confiscate students’ cell phones if they go off during class. Laurence Thomas has his own approach to classroom distractions. If the philosopher at Syracuse University catches a student sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class, he’ll end the class on the spot and walk out. It doesn’t matter if there is but one texter in a large lecture of hundreds of students. If you text, he will leave.
Hey, if you’re an incompetent doofus, why not punish the largely innocent to compensate for your manifest failings?
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Wonder if this school has required attendance. Wonder if the prof can fit out the door with a head that inflated.
So couldn’t a sufficiently intelligent but malicious student just keep doing it? If you’re already confident that you can pass the class without paying attention to the lecture, but the professor has decreed mandatory attendance, isn’t this the way to get out of wasting a few hours a week? Or rather, wouldn’t the professor be forced to buckle to reality before the students? You can pitch a fit every so often, sure, but if you decide to cancel your classes every day for two or three weeks, eventually the university is going to step in…
…and the only thing the professor will have proven is that he’s less mature than a nineteen-year-old. ;p
Seriously, I went from sleeping in class in high school to just not bothering in college, and it didn’t have much effect on my grades. I can see how you’d be annoyed with students disrupting the class, but if they’re being quiet about it, who cares if they’ve got a novel propped open or a game of WOW on the laptop?
Once upon a time, I aspired to become a university faculty member. Sadly, with the passage of years, I have been given a number of excellent reasons to be grateful that I did not achieve such a position. Having to associate closely with such “educators” as this is among those reasons.
Someone has rather badly neglected this “professor”’s proper education in the very discipline he claims to teach. Philosophically, he does not seem to understand the basic nature of the act of education itself.
If what he had to say in his lecture-hall sessions had useful importance to his students - even if his lecture’s only significance to them was as an essential component in the achievement of a passing grade - he would not need to concern himself with their behavior beyond their generally quiet demeanor. Nor would he give any attention to the occasional inattentive individual, so long as they were not interfering with his or others’ attention to the lecture.
Unfortunately, his general cluelessness in what he should be about will work to further diminish any level of “respect” for him in a classroom.
At this point, he would be doing his students a service if he did resign - one can hope that he would be replaced by someone with a better, more effective educational philosophy.
SDN’s rule of Professorial Quality: it is exactly inversely proportional to the rigor with which he enforces the attendance policy.
I field-tested this through undergraduate and an MBA, and never found an instance where it was a reliable predictor.
wasn’t, d*mnit. PIMF
I had a professor like that in the mid-60’s. The only technology he had to deal with was tape recorders, and he refused to lecture with a tape recorder running. He made everone who brought one in put it up front near the lectern, and would periodically look it them to make sure the reels weren’t turning.
After I graduated, I was told that the professor, by degrees, stopped shaving, stopped getting haircuts, stopped wearing suits and stopped bathing. He later loaded his faculty office with canned goods and locked himself in. His family got a court order to have him committed.
I’m not saying this guy is headed to the same end, but the school really needs to monitor his performance and behavior.