Its Own Post

I'll not name the names here, but the following story illustrates something about the undergrad mindset here. I don't know that this is necessarily all that different from the undergrad mindset anywhere, and note 1, that my own undergrad experience at Rice was probably atypical, and 2, that I in particular am a big nerd and did all of the reading for all of my classes in college.

A professor is running a course for 200 students. The first class meets on Tuesday with effectively perfect attendance, every seat in the auditorium full. They ran through the syllabus in typical fashion, and there was a single 15 page reading assignment for Thursday. ASU utilizes a program called Blackboard, and the pertinent feature is that you can log into your ASU account and download documents - like the reading for Thursday - from the class's Blackboard website. Of course, since each student is logging in and then downloading the document, Blackboard can easily track who has and who has not at least downloaded the article (Blackboard can't, sadly, probe into minds and determine whether students read the article, just whether they clicked the link or not). The professor can get these stats from Blackboard easily, too.

So the hour before class rolls around on Thursday, the professor checks the stats, and only 80 people have even clicked the link, let alone read the article. Our professor is an angry professor, so the first thing he does in the following class is ask who did the reading. A couple of problems: there are only 130 or so people present, and essentially all of them raise their hands. The professor then explains that some people in the room are clearly lying, asks the question again, and again gets raised hands from nearly the entire room. The professor then explains as I have above that he knows for a fact that only 80 people even clicked the link, and again asks the question; still, 100 or so people raise their hands. The prof drops a pop quiz on them (which he has no intention of grading or reading through, only to use to record attendance) and gives off some Voldemortish kind of laugh as he does so*.

So this story was related to me as fairly typical, which means there's a very prevalent mindset of not attending class and not doing reading assignments. Big state school big class, fair enough. But what's interesting is the prof's response - in order to combat the mindset, he has to resort to goofy, scary in-class antics to get them to do the reading. The student body has fostered an attitude of distrust. Again, perhaps unsurprising, but it's only going to serve to create all kinds of negative perceptions of the undergrads that are not really going to inspire anyone to teach. And of course, the professor's response, while to some degree necessary, antagonizes the few students who are doing the reading (I suppose it antagonizes all of the students who didn't read, too, but they deserve what they get to some degree). So the class is turn hates him. And so the entire scene fosters an antagonistic attitude - and I'm no pedagogy expert, but I sincerely doubt that's the best launching point in the first week of class.

I agree with the assessment here that the prof has little to no recourse other than to threaten grades, and by and large that is the purpose behind those grades anyways. But when things become so overtly antagonistic, it's no wonder that educating the undergrads becomes a low priority**. Grad students benefit from this big time - if anything, I think we're a source of relief - but that hardly rectifies the situation, especially since same grad students TA these classes and can bear the brunt of the students' chagrin.

Anyways, that's a little taste of some of the bigger issue mass education obstacles that we face here. I'll keep this topic in mind as I progress, but so far, it's been a pretty clear indication that things like the Rice honor code and such would be horribly impractical here (and sure, it's debatable how real that was at Rice, but at least within a small community you could posit that it at least might be followed; here, no way).

* - a wise, feminist ethics oriented friend of mine pointed out that this would be nigh impossible for a female professor to pull off without instantly being labeled "bitch." I am curious as to the parallel (or, I suppose, entirely unparallel) reaction to this male prof's act - does his "take no bullshit" attitude win him praise, or does the epithet "he's a dick" carry equal weight? Probably both, I suppose, but does the balance fall in his favor?

** - That said, the honors college students I have met, and a lot of the "regular" undergrads, have been great so far. And there are a lot of professors who are seriously dedicated to undergraduate education in the face of such obstacles. So I don't mean this to be some kind of indictment; more of an observation on the realities of large scale state education.