Professor Galloway could probably moonlight writing dialogue for David Mamet. Student e-mail and his response HERE. Even though every thing he says is true I could never in a million years respond the way he did:
- My baseline of cowardice with respect to interpersonal conflict is too high,
- Students are already accommodating my inability to get my own sh*t together as far as various neuroses (mostly gum chewing and leg bouncing), so who am I to lecture them?
- Sometimes what we take to be evidence of the student not having their sh*t together is really just the detritus of them fighting the good fight too many fronts.
As far as the third one goes, an increasing problem I've seen since the great recession began is students missing class because of their work schedules and then showing up often not during your office hours asking you to teach them half a semester's worth of material. Nobody I know has a good policy to deal with this, and when you are teaching something like logic, this can entail giving the same lecture over and over and over again in the course of semester. I can imagine writing a letter like Galloway's in response to this kind of thing, but I just think it would be wrong. Many of these students are the first to go to college in their family and they happen to be going at a time when the social contract has been rewritten expressly to screw them over. I mean, I can't say that they should be taking out unsubsidized loans instead of working. On the other hand, if enough students do it, it can crowd out everything else you might get done that day.
I'd be really interested in what people think of Galloway's letter and any policies people put in place to deal with students who don't have their sh*t together in various ways.
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