Here are the results of yesterday's poll, as of about 10pm Eastern. Blue bars are the fraction of respondents saying that a given behavior (wearing hats, eating in class, drinking in class, leaving class to go to the bathroom) was acceptable, red bars the fraction saying it was unacceptable:
You can also see the results broken down by whether the respondents were faculty or students (solid bars are student responses, striped bars faculty):
It's interesting to see how uniformly permissive my readers are, though that may simply reflect the science-y tilt of my readership. When the topic comes up in faculty discussions, science and engineering faculty tend to lean more toward allowing students to do whatever they like, while humanities faculty tend to be slightly more restrictive.
I think this split reflects the different styles of classes favored by the different disciplines, at least in the small-liberal-arts-college setting where I teach. Science and engineering classes tend to involve a good deal of lecturing, because that's the nature of the disciplines: the courses are built around transferring factual information from faculty to students. There's very little point in discussing how students feel about the conservation of energy-- so long as the laws of physics are invariant in time, we're stuck with it. In the humanities, on the other hand, classes tend to be much more discussion-oriented, with many faculty going to great lengths to avoid anything that smacks of a traditional lecture.
That difference is reflected in the attitudes toward student behaviors. If you're teaching a lecture course, and a student wants to eat, drink, or wander out of the room to go to the bathroom, so long as they're not hugely disruptive about it, they're only hurting themselves. If you wander off and miss the part of the class where the professor works an example problem exactly like the one that will be on the test, it sucks for you, but the rest of the class is basically unaffected.
In a discussion class, on the other hand, there's much less leeway. Leaving the room in the middle of a discussion changes the whole atmosphere. There's practically no way for a student to both participate meaningfully in the class and also take an unscheduled bathroom break. As a result, those faculty members tend to have a lower threshold regarding potentially disruptive behavior.
Personally, I'm pretty laid-back about all of these. I have no problem with hats (other than the fact that some of my male students wear hats so regularly that I have trouble recognizing them without a hat), I don't care if students eat and drink so long as they don't make a huge production of it and disturb other students, and I don't stop people from leaving class if they need to.
(On one memorable occasion, with two weeks to go in the term, a student packed up his books with twenty minutes to go in the class, and walked out. He never turned up again that term. That was the only time I recall students commenting on another student leaving the room-- a couple of them asked "Hey, can we do that, too?")
I'm kind of amused by the fact that the question with the strongest "Yes" response from all groups is the bathroom one. Of all the behaviors listed, that's the one I come closest to wanting to forbid, mostly because it sometimes throws me off for a beat or two when a student gets up and walks out. I've never actually done anything about it, but it's the one that bugs me the most.
As far as the others go, I don't forbid hats, even during quizzes and exams. I tend to provide formula sheets, or even allow students to make their own, so there's really nothing they could write on the brim of a ball cap that would be worth the bother, and the classes I teach are small enough that it would take more than a hat to hide wandering eyes.
As to food and drink, I frequently went to morning classes with a cinnamon roll and a large Coke from the snack bar when I was a student, so it would feel kind of hypocritical to forbid my students from doing the same. I might say something if a student started loudly crunching Doritos, or sat down to tuck into a bowl of natto, but I've never had the issue come up.
Of course, as noted above, I mostly teach lecture classes, so I don't have that many concerns about disrupting the flow of the class. And as noted by one anonymous student commenter a few terms ago, I am "loud and intense," so I don't have to worry too much about controlling the class. Other people who are naturally a little quieter (or just smaller) may feel a stronger need to establish ground rules for the classroom.
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My God man, it's the bathroom. What kind of cruel taskmaster are you? :D
If I saw someone sit down to tuck into a bowl of natto, I'd not make them stop, but I *would* have a word with them about how they can possibly stand to eat such an abomination ;)
Surely if you allow food and drink, it's only consistent to allow students to go for a leak or a dump?
Still sounds funny to me as a UKer reading you discussing students going to the bathroom - here we have a bath (tub or shower) in a bathroom, there's a clue in the name and the idea of a student saying "wow! I have bad BO, I'd better have a shower immediately!" requires a paradigm shift.
Why does American English have to be euphemistic about the micturodefecatorium?
UKers often make fun of the Americanism "bathroom," but "toilet" really means the same thing -- a toilet was originally a dressing table, and came by extension to mean dressing (and bathing) room. It's just as much a euphemism as "bathroom." And "Water closet" just means "water room," so it's still eumphemistic, in that it doesn't refer to the activity that goes on there. After all, the water room might also refer to the room where you bathe.
("Loo" is a weird one with a murky etymology, but in any case it's a sort of neologism that isn't really a part of US English.)
British people are just as eumphemistic as Americans, I say.
I once did manage to disrupt a class by eating a slice of Pizza:
Prof (coming in the door): Where'd you get that?
Me: The MGC (Math Grad Committee) is selling it up by the C&D.
Prof (to rest of class): I'll be right back.
(She had previously said she had no problem with eating in class, as many of us had a non-stop 9:30 to 2:30 run of classes.)
My physics professors are also pretty laid back about such things, while my english professor insists that we not leave class even 5 minutes early without clearing it with her before class.
However, my first semester of physics we had this kid who had no good sense of time or behavior. He walked into class 10 minutes late (typical), sat down his stuff, and walked across the classroom to me (who knows why) to ask how I worked the homework (which was already too late to turn in). I just sort of looked at him incredulously and turned back to the professor (who had been trying to lecture the whole time). She was pretty justifiably ticked off.
On the last lecture day of this past semester, one of the graduating seniors walked in looking... oddly like he was wearing too many layers of clothes. Ten minutes before the lecture was over, he got a phone call. Ringer on loudest setting, funny song... and he answered it. And he talked. The professor tried to carry on, until the guy packs up his stuff, stands up suddenly, and says emphatically "I'll take care of this!!" He rips open his shirt to reveal a superman shirt, and rushes out of class. Laughter follows, the professor continues. Two minutes later, another guy who wasn't in the class comes in, sits at the other guy's desk, and says something like "well, that takes care of that."
In the part of the US where I live you don't go to the bathroom, but to the restroom. That's the problem with euphemisms: they wear off and you need to keep up coming up with new ones.
I suspect it's all about what has really irritated people in the past. Having been distracted by the scent of the big mac and fries elsewhere in a classroom, and having been crawled over in lecture hall situations, my sympathies tend toward the low end.
Would I absolutely prohibit any of these things? Unknown, but the ones I mentioned as "unacceptable" are the ones that really annoy me.
I just say, "I have to go to the euphemism." Why mince words?
These are not trivial considerations.
Part of why my term ended when I taught at Rose City High School, Pasadena's "continuation" high school for students with alcohol, drug, weapon, pregnancy, gang, or other distractions, was that I sometimes failed to have students remove their hats or the hoods of their hoodies, and did not universally confiscate food. I also let a gang leader go to the bathroom without a pass, and he was caught by the principal, with his droogies, at a vending machine.
I suppose that there something worse than not having a job, such as not having a job and knowing that this can never improve, for disability or prejudice or ultra-high unemployment reasons.
These can't stop me.
Unemployment in California just rose to 9.3%, highest since 1994 (when I was still searching for a replacement to my Rockwell job that paid, correcting for inflation, $180,000/year). In L.A. County, official unemployment is 9.9%. And rising fast.
Thursday I was at CSULA campus until almost 7 p.m. I gave my professor (after her other section of the class I'm
taking) a copy of my 20-page draft Scholarship Application, as she's on the committee that hands those out, says they have unspent money, and knows that I can't pay next quarter for the class that sends me to student teach unpaid. Hello! Future teachers are required to have nagtive wages for a quarter year before being credentialed to be paid the next quarter?
Also Thursday 22 Jan 09 I was told by Financial Aid that
(1) I have a loan now covering this quarter's enrollment; (2) I should
get a check 2 weeks from Monday reflecting a retroactive loan for the last quarter(s) that I paid for out of pocket (when I was teaching for a semester at a charter school, which just paid off all but 1 of their High School teachersa, including, the one Science teacher). Now, as I have under $100 (!) in my bank account, I have to be very very frugal (say this in Elmer Fudd voice) for 2 weeks.
Yesterday (Fri) I was up at 6:00 a.m., showered, suited up, rushed through rain to the Charter school at far edge of CSULA campus (Stern Math and Science School) and Observed 3 other teachers for 6 sometimes excruciating hours. I took 28 pages of handwritten ethnographic observations. I'll submit those raw observations and a sophisticated Reflection (in jargon form another textbook I had to buy) Tuesday, as 6 of the 18 hours I must Observe in this grad class. I get an additional 2 hours for reporting on the French film "The Class." I was pleased that Faculty and Assistant Principal asked if this was where I'll be student teaching. It's up to my prof, who I selected in part
because she makes those assignments. She's a big fan of the TV series "24." Maybe I should hack into the university and State data bases and give myself the credential.
Anyway, a lot of the Observations and Reflections are focussed on "Classroom Environment." I took a 4-credit grad class last quarter entirely on "Classroom Environment."
Wearing hats, eating in class, drinking in class, leaving class to go to the bathroom -- nontrivial subjects of many many research papers, and some grad textbooks.
I'll reiterate again:
Being a Secondary School Teacher requires you to balance professionalism simultaneously in:
(1) Instruction of Content to Standards;
(2) Management (classroom management and Lesson Planning plus related administrative overhead);
(3) Assessment (of students, of environment, and self-assessment).
In my grad class on Classroom Management, I turned in a school record for size of final assignment:
a 126-page (single-spaced laserprinted, copiously referenced) Classroom Management Plan.
Excerpt:
D.4. How would I characterize my motivational style/approach?
What is motivation? What is style?
I have explained the neurological basis of motivation in D.1., so let me give an artistic explanation of style.
In today's Los Angeles Times we have the following:
BOOK REVIEW
'The Delighted States' by Adam Thirlwell
A critic romps through continental literature.
By Susan Salter Reynolds
June 1, 2008
The Delighted States:
A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators,
Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents,
& Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations,
& a Variety of Helpful Indexes
Adam Thirlwell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 568 pp., $30
"Proust, he notes, says style isn't a matter of technique; rather, 'it's like colour for a painter -- a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees, and that other people don't see.' But style, like real life, cannot be too precious, controlled or confining. Real life is stylized, he says, 'but it is
messy as well. It is an accurate portrait of minute feelings.'"
I provide the obvious parallel to my motivational style/approach in the classroom.
(1) With all due respect to the excellent professors and curriculum at Charter College of Education, it is not the techniques alone -- not merely lesson plans and classroom management plans -- that make a great teacher. Nor is it the pure art of a "natural born teacher" (the Buddha said that 1 person in 5 is a born teacher). It is a synthesis
of the two: an innately motivated and talented teacher, with an armamentarium of technical cures to classroom ills.
(2) Beyond that necessary blend of the science of teaching and the art of teaching, what matters is akin to color for a painter -- a quality of vision of the teacher. The teacher fails if he or she sees the world through rose-colored glasses, filled with idealistic progressive
notions and great expectations, yet with no ability to handle the challenges of the urban classroom. The teacher fails if he or she sees the world through army camouflage, intending "tough love" and military precision in shooting down inappropriate behavior, because the teacher and the student are not enemies, and the classroom is not a
battlefield. What does the teacher envision, and how can that be combined with the vision of the students?
(3) What is the revelation of the particular universe that the teacher sees, and that other people don't see? I have explained at length in this draft Classroom Management Plan that revelation is one of 5 distinct forms of truth, and of how my vision comes from a combination of science (my education and professional career as a scientist) and
art (my parents' education and careers in English Literature, my uncles and cousins who are painters and photographers and filmmakers, my childhood among the Literati of Brooklyn Heights, my coauthorship and coeditorship with immortal authors such as Asimov, Bradbury,
Clarke, and Feynman).
(4) Specifically, as I have written, my approach is the focus on 3 big questions: what is the universe (and how does it work); what is a human being; and what is the place of that human being in that universe? My focus is on questions, not on answers. My approach is to further the ability of students, individually and in groups, to ask
better questions, with more joy. The image is Albert Einstein riding his bicycle at Caltech. He rose to be Time Magazine's Man of the Century, among the greatest concentration of scientists in Berlin, among whom would be over a dozen who won Nobel Prizes, because he asked the best questions. He played the violin. His hair style and
life style was bohemian. And in the Caltech photos (and the famous photographic portrait taken by my great uncle) he is smiling, on the edge of breaking out in laughter.
(5) Caveat: style, like real life, cannot be too precious, controlled or confining. There is a great deal of theory in this Classroom Management Plan. Not just the minimum of 3 theorists (Dreikurs and the many philosophers and scientific researchers cited), but the tip of an iceberg of thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the universe and
the human being. But theory alone ill-equips a teacher.
What I write here also comes from common sense experience with over 3,000 students, teenagers through over 90 years old, in a dozen different subjects, [whom I taught]
since 1973. The teacher does not control the classroom. The teacher does not confine the students to proper instructional attitude. Real life, in the classroom, is messy as well. The techniques of Classroom Management are ways to minimize the mess that will happen regardless
of good intentions. The Social Contract is a realistic basis for encountering the mess, just as the United States Constitution has stood two centuries of messy history. Thus a balance can be achieved of instruction, assessment, and management.
(6) The teacher, in his or her mind, narrates or paints an accurate portrait of minute feelings. The human beings in the classroom are thinkers, yes, but also human because of a full palette of emotions. Adolescent students, going through a "phase transition" in their lives, their brains rewiring themselves, their bodies flooded with hormones, have their social network quivering like a spiderweb shaking
in the morning breeze, their sense of belonging to pairs and trios and subgroups in and beyond the classroom under repeated reappraisal. The teacher must respect the dignity of the student, giving attention to the minute variations in feeling, encouraging the positive, enabling the negative to be self- and group-regulated.
As Philosopher of History Samuel P. Huntington writes in his first sentence:
"The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, stability, and
those countries whose politics is deficient in those qualities."
[Political Order in Changing Societies (The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series) (Paperback), by Samuel P. Huntington, 488 pages, Yale University Press, 1970]
This remarkable and underappreciated book is Hobbesian in outlook and Hegelian in method. That the book is Hobbesian in outlook is indicated by the justly famous opening sentence, and confirmed by Huntington's elaboration of that statement: "The function of government is to govern. A weak government, a government which lacks authority, fails
to perform its function and is immoral in the same sense in which a corrupt judge, a cowardly soldier, or an IGNORANT TEACHER is immoral"
(p. 28, emphasis by Jonathan Vos Post).
Samuel P. Huntington, better known today (and linked to Francis Fukuyama who wrote a new foreword for the 2006 edition) for his theory of the "Clash of Civilizations" goes on to quote Walter Lippman:
"I do know that there is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed."
[Walter Lippman, New York Herald Tribune, 10 Dec 1963, p.24, quoted in Huntington, Op. Cit., p. 2]
This Classroom Management Plan is a rough cut of my characterization of a motivational style/approach, informed by art and cutting-edge science, intended to guide the self-government of students asking great questions, and living a life worth living.
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WTF man, you should get your own blog.