Like many of my fellow college cohorts, I can easily embarrass myself. Whether I’m looking at my vomit-stained shoes from a previous night of bar hopping or getting laughed at after confessing love to a good friend, I have perfected the art of self-embarrassment.
But that’s just normal human behavior and it’s well known that as college students, we can easily forget the embarrassment and write it off as memories of the college experience. But what about the embarrassment caused by others? And I’m not talking about the time when you and your buddies got together and decided that pulling your pants down in front of the girl you like is funny. Or the time you and your sorority sister wore the same dress to a party. (I actually heard two sorority girls talking about the embarrassment of wearing the same outfit to a party. Dear God, the embarrassment!)
I’m talking about the embarrassment that some professors inflict on students during class for one trivial reason or another.
Take, for example, the time I walked into one of my writing classes on the first day of school. This being my second semester, I’ve yet to learn every single building on campus. As I rushed past every Liberal Arts building to my assigned room, I silently walked in literally five minutes late and the teacher, who’d started her lecture, stopped talking and followed my every move until I found a seat at the very back of the class.
Now, I could have easily taken the time to get to school an hour earlier to figure out where my classroom is located, but let’s be realistic. How many students actually make the time to explore their campus after the tour given to you when you apply for Cal State Long Beach? Not many.
Did the teacher really have to stop her lecture and deprive the rest of the class from explaining the content of the syllabus because of one student who didn’t take the time to figure out where his classes were located?’Did I deserve the punishment of embarrassment because I walked in five minutes late on the first day of class?
I understand that many professors hate the interruption that a tardy student might cause as they enter their teaching space. It makes them lose their train of thought, but some teachers will go the distance to make sure that we understand the consequences of being late – consequences that usually result in an angry stare or a mild humiliation that makes a student want to hide in the seat that’s farther away from the rest of the class.
There was another time when a professor stopped his class and walked up to a student who was taking a sip of water, and pointed to a sign in a wall that read'”No Drinking Allowed.”
After the whole class turned their heads to check out the commotion the teacher had stirred, the student had no other option but blush and hide his water back in his backpack.
Later in the semester, the same professor once again stopped his class to tell a girl who was surfing the net on her laptop to either leave or “turn the damn thing off.”
As much as I hate to hear the annoying typing in laptops during class, what I hate even more is the fact that I’m paying for a class where the teacher is busy playing babysitter for grown college students.
I’m not saying that rules should be broken and everyone should just disrupt lectures. What I’m saying is that if a student chooses to be late to class, surf the Web or read a book for another class while the lecture is taking place, our precious time should not be spent witnessing how a teacher embarrasses a student by going off in rants about following guidelines and how we should pay attention during class.
Students who decide to be late or surf the Web on their state-of-the-art Apple laptops should be free to do so as long as they don’t disrupt other students from learning. It’s their money, they’ve paid for the class. If they want a zero for the rest of the semester, so be it. As long as I can get my education on, it’s all good.
Julio Salgado is a junior journalism major and the staff cartoonist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
