<p>I’m totally buying it and wish more professors, teachers, parents, coaches, etc would insist on punctuality and manners.</p>
<p>We’ve taken the kids to the theater for years. At the risk of sounding like an old person, there was a time when everyone would arrive on time and once the theater was dark, you could enjoy the show. For some reason, people now seem to think that the starting time is just a suggestion. People think that they are entitled to arrive at THEIR convenience and not care about everybody else.</p>
<p>Sorry, there is no shopping period for movies. Try a different analogy. There is a reason why universities have shopping periods. It’s for the students’ convenience.The student used it appropriately.</p>
<p>My S made use of the Harvard shopping period every single semester. He is now a graduate student in another school where there is also a shopping period, which apparently lasts longer than one week. </p>
<p>Harvard is famous for Math 55. Students may shop it (and usually it attracts some 50+ students on the first day), and if they find it too challenging, they may drop to a lower level course within the next three weeks; in turn those in the lower level course may drop to an ever lower level math course. Disruptive? you bet. But it is an accepted practice encouraged by the profs themselves. Everyone, including the Course Assistants, learn to adjust.</p>
<p>I’ll bet the prof disrupted his own class a great deal more than the student by stopping his lecture to order him out of the class.<br>
The prof inconvenienced everyone in that class.</p>
<p>I am 100% in agreement with the professor. Even if it was shopping period. It is wrong to come in that late to a class- disruptive and rude. The kicker, however, was the arrogant need on the part of the student to email the professor to chastise him for setting a policy in his own class.</p>
<p>Movie analogy was used not because it has a “shopping period.” It is used because it is similar to a class where there is a central performer (professor, movie) and there is a group of audience who are trying to pay attention to what the central performer is doing.</p>
<p>My kids take ballet classes. They could try out classes, but they must stay for the whole class. They couldn’t even pop in or out to go to bathroom except during a scheduled break, unless it’s an emergency. It is a discipline. It is respect for people in the class and for the teacher. It is not all about YOU, what’s good for YOU.</p>
<p>My kids have been involved with ballet performance for over 15 years. They practice and practice for the performance. Many parents would come in just when their kids’ are performing and leave as soon they are done. They feel it is perfectly fine to walk in and out of an auditorium while other kids are performing because it works better for them. The school couldn’t afford to have guards at the door (like other professional auditoriums), but at some point you would expect parents to set an example as to how to behave at those situations.</p>
<p>My kids’ performance situation is not exactly same as the situation we are discussing here, but it still falls under what’s proper behavior and the entitlement attitude. The professor’s email may have been harsh, but he wouldn’t have to write such email if the kid was taught at home.</p>
<p>I had this professor that if he thought the class was not prepare he ended the class. It happens twice in the semester…then the student was responsible for the material.</p>
<p>In one occasion the class supposed to read three chapters and he began asking questions. The first three persons asked did not know what he was talking about so he ended the class for that day, next time he continued with the next subjects.
It was upsetting, but the whole class learned a lesson.</p>
<p>First of all, many classes only meet twice a week. Seminars meet once a week for two hours. As well, at many colleges, the most popular classes meet at exactly the same time, from 10 to about 1. So if you want to shop more than two classes that meet at the same time, you have to leave one before it’s finished and go to another after it has started. Profs know that. I speak from experience. It has been the same at Harvard from the time I was a grad student to the time my younger son graduated. I doubt you would find a Harvard prof who would write such a letter. Amusing, yes. And also very wrong-headed.<br>
I gather that I’m not the only person to think that prof to be too full of himself.</p>
<p>My colleges and my law school had shopping. I’m going to suppose that this student went to such a college, and that Stern does not have this kind of policy.</p>
<p>If we’re talking about a lecture class, then I think this professor was overreacting. A professor should have the concentration skills to continue talking when a hundredth person enters or leaves the lecture hall. If it was a small discussion-based seminar, then I am far more sympathetic to his position that arriving late was disruptive. Either way, publicizing his criticism of the student to the rest of the class, with the student’s name attached, is tacky. If the student is a loser and needs to learn a lesson, that’s between the student and the prof.</p>
<p>The movie analogy was also used because it appears to me that the “entitlement” mentaly has extended to areas other than the ones I am accustomed to. I can’t imagine raising my child to think that his/her schedule is more impotant than anybody elses and everything should be set up to accomodate him/her. The student was rude and arrogant.</p>
<p>I think part of the problem is where do you draw the line. My husband is a teacher and it’s not a big deal if one person comes to class late once in awhile but he said it was getting to the point where many people were arriving late everyday and it became very distracting. He was tired of it so he also implemented a policy of no one is supposed to arrive late. He has never told anyone to leave if they have arrived late but having the policy made it so the late arrivals are few and far between.</p>
<p>then I’m disappointed in Harvard. My kids’ schools had shopping periods, but you did not walk in and out of classes. You attended one at a time.</p>
<p>as a part-time prof myself, I’m totally on the prof’s side, and I think he offered the student a valuable lesson he probably won’t benefit from.</p>
<p>Not if it’s business school, it absolutely isn’t! In business school, they most certainly expect you to act like a professional. They expect you to network like a professional, they expect you to behave like a professional, they expect you to fully BE a professional who is just incidentally taking classes. Anybody working on their MBA will tell you that.</p>
<p>“I think he offered the student a valuable lesson he probably won’t benefit from.”</p>
<p>That may be so, but why humiliate him in front of his classmates? Or if that was meant to benefit the classmates, why not redact the student’s name?</p>
I don’t read that assumption either from the student’s action or from his letter. He wasn’t asking for anything to be “set up to accommodate him,” he was questioning the way the professor responded when things didn’t go the way they were set up to go. There’s a difference.</p>
<p>Honestly, I teach undergrads, and I don’t ask students to leave. They’re mostly freshmen, and they’re still learning the ropes. An MBA student should know better, and his email certainly showed he didn’t. If some of the students were wandering in and out of classes for the first few weeks, then little learning/teaching will be accomplished. How is that a good thing?</p>