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Did we do anything in class?

I often get questions phrased like this:

“I have to be absent Friday. Are we going to do anything?”
“I was sick yesterday. Did anything happen in class?”

Teachers do not react well to questions like these. We’re tempted to say, “Nothing happened at all. We sat there counting our fingers as usual.” But that wouldn’t be helpful.

Where the question comes from

I have to assume that the student asking the question is genuinely interested in keeping up with the work. That’s good.

I suspect that some high school teachers don’t have enough material planned, so they simply tell you to do your homework in class (so nothing really did happen—it was just an empty hour). I also suspect that some high school teachers do not publish lesson plans or assignment schedules, so every day is a surprise to the students (and possibly to the teacher as well). If a high school kid misses a day of class, the reading assignments, homework assignments, and major paper assignments also get missed.

Neither of those is true in college. We only have three hours per week to work with, and we’re very conscious that we can’t get everything done in that time, so you’ll never have a “homework day” in class. We also must give our supervisors a planned-out syllabus at the start of the semester, so you will probably never arrive in a college classroom where the teacher hasn’t a clue how to fill the hour.

The bottom line is that yes, we are going to do something in class. Every single time we meet.

I suspect that the students who ask the question that way aren’t trying to be insulting. They are simply used to an education environment in which many classes are time-fillers, not places to actually learn anything.

Figuring out what we did in class

A surprising number of my students don’t realize that our Blackboard site (including the links to the daily schedule included in each week’s folder) lists all the readings we do. Start there.

Let’s not forget friends

One of your best resources is a smart pal who can tell you what happened in class. You want the attentive person, not the goof-off who is sending Tweets, looking at porn, or sleeping. You don’t even want the person who spends the hour studying for the Principles of Marketing test that’s coming in the next hour. You want someone who is actually paying attention to English. If someone asks a good question in class or the teacher gives a memorable illustration, your smart pal is your best hope for getting the information. If you’re really lucky, you can find someone who takes notes!

Why I won’t type out my notes for you

After only a couple of classes, you should have realized that I am not reading from a typed manuscript. I don’t even use a detailed outline very often. Much of the time, I’m using the material on the screen as my outline, and the extra comments and illustrations are impromptu. That means that to give you my entire lecture, I would struggle to remember, type the whole thing out, and hope that I had included everything. That sounds like a couple of hours of work.

Did your high school teachers REALLY type out their notes for you if you missed a class??

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