Hi again: Let me share a story with you and then ask a question. In my previous post I mentioned a student (a psychology major and one of my advisees) who told me that she found one of my classes last semester to be boring and monotonous. This is the same student who approached me this semester before one of my classes and said: "Dr. Hetzel, I just wanted to tell you that I have a test next period in another class and that I'm going to be studying for this test during your class today." Her plan was to attend my class, but have her books and notes out for her other class so she could study for the test. There are only about ten students in this class and we all sit around one big table. I told her that I understood her anxiety about her upcoming test, but would consider her behavior to be rude and disruptive to the rest of the class. She still studied for her test, but tried to be discrete about it. About two weeks later she came to me and told me that she was going to do the same thing in my class again, but this time she was going to review her notes for a speech she had to give later in the day. She told me that she was a "kinesthetic learner" and that she doesn't get a whole lot out of attending any of her classes but that she learned best when she was "multi-tasking." I again told her that it was inappropriate to engage in that kind of behavior in the classroom. She continued to prepare for her speech during my class. Well, I was meeting with this student yesterday in my office and she was commending herself for being brutally honest with people, which she saw as an admirable personality trait. She gave as an example the two examples that I mentioned above. I told her that being honest was indeed an admirable trait, but that she should also consider how she comes across to others and whether or not she is sending the message that she intends to send. I told her again that I had considered her behavior in those two situations to be rude and disrespectful and asked her if that was what she had intended to communicate to me. She completely surprised me by bursting into tears and telling me that noone had ever mentioned that to her. We talked about this a bit more. At the time, all of this was being discussed within the broader context of graduate school applications and professionalism. My experience has been that this type of behavior is absolutely unacceptable in graduate school. It should also be unacceptable in undergraduate education (particularly smaller, upper-level classes). How would all of you handle situations in which a student comes up to and tells you that he or she is going to be working on other assignments during your class session. What do you do when students don't make this announcement to you, but they just come to your class and start working on assignments for another class. They never teach you how to handle this stuff in grad school... Rod [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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