February 22, 2006

Skipping Class To Sleep

Dan may know a bit more about this, but here's an article about students, professors, and the emails that bring them together. In the article and some of the commentary to this I see a lot of hand wringing about the demystification of the professor, but that's really nothing I ever experienced in my years of education. Granted, I went to a small school, but I always thought that professors that made a big deal about being called "professor" or that avoided being too friendly with students were, to put it mildly, jerks.

1 comment:

Noumena said...

I'll need to come back to this -- I need to get a chunk out of this 120 page reading assignment done tonight -- but I will say that, at non-liberal arts schools, the gap between professor and undergraduates is huge. While virtually all classes at UPS were capped at 25 students or so, undergrads at most schools won't be in a class that size until their junior or senior year. So professors (and instructors of large lecture sections more generally) will simply have too many students to know them by name, or even by face, while of course each student (well, for the most part) is going to know the professor's name. Requiring students, at least undergrads, to call you 'Professor X' or 'Doctor Y' isn't exactly being elitist; it's to keep some stranger from being too personal.