articles from three universities about the class on Wednesday before Thanksgiving controversy.
(Very pleasant, thank you, and I hope yours was too. Highlight: Playing Rock Band, UD‘s sister on drums, La Kid on guitar, and UD warbling into the mike. We did all these songs I sort of know… sort of know the chorus, maybe… Ramblin’ Man, Kids of America, American Woman… Started mentally ramblin’ during Ramblin’ Man… I was thinking Allman Brothers didn’t Cher marry one of them Sonny always seemed dumb named one of his kids Chesare because you couldn’t expect people to figure it out if they named him Cesare…)
So here’s my take on Should we cancel Wednesday classes before the holiday.
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What’s happening, most broadly, at the American university right now is what UD calls Invisibility Drift. Classes used to meet three days a week; now most meet two. There used to be very few holidays and cancellations; now there are gobs. Official cancellations and particular professors cancelling for this and that reason. Some class sessions you just watch a film, which you can do anywhere, at any time, and there’s nothing class about it… I mean, no one’s up there teaching you something; there’s no discussion going on. The classroom, the professor, other students, the university — all incidental. I’ve read more than one Rate My Professor complaint about professors in courses like these turning out the lights, starting the film, and leaving. See you next Tuesday! Enjoy the show.
Add to this high levels of class skipping among students (I did plenty when I was an undergrad), high levels of watching tv shows on your laptop or texting while you’re in class, high levels of guest lecturers instead of the ostensible professor teaching the class, high levels of blowing the course off and looking at downloaded stuff in your dorm…
You get the idea. The university as a physical location where professors and students interact in real, flesh and blood time and place vanishes. Does your professor look at you and talk to you and think in front of you? Do you look at the professor and listen to her and take notes? Do students look at each other and talk to each other? Bring books and look at the places in the books where the professor directs their attention?
No. Ain’t much attention going on in the vanishing classroom. People are absent — physically or mentally.
So look at it this way. Administrators are aware that at $50,000 a year or so they need to, well, pay attention to the fact that their enterprise as more or less originally conceived and priced is vanishing. At least at British universities, where you seldom see a professor or take a class, they don’t charge much of anything. Here in a quintessentially postmodern transaction you pay immense sums of money for white noise. (Let’s not even talk about the Human Kinetics and Leisure Studies major you’ve chosen.)
Am I saying it’s all evaporated? No. I’m talking about a trend. I’m talking about administrators’ awareness of a trend.
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So slot this into yet another canceled day — the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. And keep in mind that when you cancel the Wednesday you also basically cancel the Tuesday and eventually the Monday — There’s some psychological principle going on here, I guess… a kind of infinite regression principle in which once you cancel Day Z, Days X and Y are imperiled…
You can see, I hope, why universities are reluctant to do this particular deal. I mean, think about it from the perspective of the many schools like Auburn and Georgia where classes are further dumped left and right because of football games … It begins to look as though we might as well forget classes for the entire months of November and December.
Many universities are therefore doing nothing for the time being about the Wednesday. They leave it up to the professor, who tends to cancel classes. Over time, so many professors will cancel as to make it impossible for the few professors who hold Wednesday class to do so. Everyone will be gone. Professors will lecture to a whistling nothingness.
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Me? I hold class. Quite a few students showed up in both classes, and we had relaxed, excellent discussions (of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist and DeLillo’s Underworld).
(I mean, I thought they were great.)
November 27th, 2009 at 10:19AM
We gave up years ago. No classes the entire Thanksgiving week. Of course, that means campus was emptying out on the Thursday before Thanksgiving. I held my class on Friday afternoon for 4 of the 20 that showed up. Afterwards, I sent out my usual email that this was the one day of the semester I took attendance and would count for the entire portion of their grade for that.
November 27th, 2009 at 10:22AM
Students are paying a hell of a lot of money per hour for these classes. Canceling them seems to me to be immoral. So what I’ve done is to make the class optional and talk about something related to the course, but off the table for examinations.
Over the years a surprising number of students have shown up. Mostly it has to do with travel and if the students are around they generally show up. Since our place is a large state university in a big city, many students live here.
I note UD, an admitted class skipper as an undergrad, held class and people showed up. Perhaps it is the quality of the classes?
November 27th, 2009 at 2:49PM
Haven’t read your blog lately – I mean to catch up! But I thought you’d find this interesting, if you haven’t run across it already:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/football-morals
November 27th, 2009 at 3:09PM
Haven’t read your blog lately – I mean to catch up! But I thought you’d find this amusing, if you haven’t run across it already:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/football-morals
November 27th, 2009 at 5:42PM
In the late 1990s, it was so out of hand that many faculty began scheduling exams on the Monday or Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. The student body got the message, and the situation improved for a few years, but now they are drifting back into bad habits. I have a feeling that a test of some sort will be appearing in a certain class next year during Thanksgiving week.
November 27th, 2009 at 9:38PM
Where I teach, we used to have a full week off at Thanksgiving. That’s actually nine days, of course, staring Saturday and lasting through the following Sunday. We also had a four-day (i.e., Thursday through Sunday) Fall Break in late October.
The days before and after the breaks were prety much a loss.
Then switched to a week-long fall break (as more and more small liberal arts colleges seem to be doing; my son attends Grinnell, and they have one the same week as ours) with Wednesday-Sunday off for Thanksgiving. Somewhere around the same time, the faculty passed legislation saying that classes were to be held on days before and after break, and then we got the most hard-assed Vice President of Academic Affairs you could possibly imagine. God bless him, he’d threaten even tenured full professors with "substandard raises" and god knows what else if we canceled a class before or after a break. And faculty started giving exams on the days before breaks. There was zero administrative sympathy for students and their parents when it came to the "we need to get a good airfare" pleas. The culture changed. Now kids expect to go to class the day before a break, even evening classes.
Yes, a few professors "hold class" and don’t take attendance. But things really are different, and it took a determined administrator willing to piss people off to make the change.
By the way, new-student orientation starts on a Saturday and classes start on a Wednesday. So while there are no classes on the Monday and Tuesday of the first week, they are made up for by the those in Thanksgiving week. Consequently, we have the same number of Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Ah, academia.
November 28th, 2009 at 12:41AM
Georgia has, of course, moved to a full week off at Thanksgiving, as of 2008. They traded Thanksgiving for a day of classes on the Thursday before the annual Georgia-Florida game, when most of the student body decamps to Jacksonville.
November 28th, 2009 at 12:05PM
Our Thanksgiving break official starts on Wednesday, but we faculty received an e-mail from the Provost chiding us for the amount of class cancellation going on for Monday and Tuesday. I held my class on Monday, and had about a 50 percent absentee rate. Few of my colleagues were at work on Monday, as evidenced by the empty parking lot, and even fewer on Tuesday. So, I completely agree that the actions of my colleagues regarding canceling class made it harder for me to hold my own (and I bet on course evals. I will get "he didn’t cancel class when my other professors did"). I also should indicate that my students are upset that I’m holding class the Monday after Thanksgiving, as many students complained they had booked plane tickets back to school that day and would now have to pay to change. The drift is both at the front and end of the vacation.
November 29th, 2009 at 8:59AM
One of my students casually informed me that besides missing class on the Monday before Thanksgiving, she would be out the whole week afterward for a "family vacation." Oh, and would I please make sure that she got a copy of any class notes?