A lot of people can wake up at 10 a.m. and feel fine. They can get out of bed feeling like they got the best sleep ever.
But me, when my alarm wakes me up that early, I feel like I’m getting slapped in the face by Shaq. By the time I get to my third class, I usually decide to skip it. I figure I’ll be asleep either way, so I may as well be sleeping in my bed.
But you know what isn’t cool? When I can only be absent to a class two times before I get dropped involuntarily.
I don’t mean to sound as if I’m lazy and just like to sleep all day, but when I’m awake until 6 a.m. studying for a biology exam, I need to skip my early morning class so I can feel rested while I take the exam.
Some teachers don’t require attendance, but many of them do. Huge lectures used to not require it, but then along came CPS clickers, the death of skipping class.
Sometimes I don’t feel like going to statistics. Sometimes I feel more like going to Slices for pizza.
It’s not like anyone is required to attend college. We made the decision to attend college, and since most of us are paying more than we can afford in order to come here, I feel like we should also make the decision to go to class as often as we’d like without the professors taking away points from our GPAs.
“I think that part of college is learning to be responsible for yourself and not relying on other people to get you to do what you need to do. Making attendance part of a grade won’t help students become self-motivated adults,” said Rudi O’Keefe-Zelman, Undergraduate Student Government’s vice president of policy.
Many professors have the attitude that if you don’t come to class, you won’t learn the material and you’ll fail the exams. Now that’s understandable. If I miss a few classes and don’t learn what happens in the smooth endoplasmic reticulum, that’s my fault. But if I can learn the same exact thing on the Internet, why would I go to class when I can sit around in my boxers eating pizza? A professor’s job is to teach the students in ways that machines and books cannot.
I don’t like going to many classes simply because they’re boring. Trust me, if professors make the class interesting enough, students will come to class whether or not they’re required to do so. If professors notice their classes are empty every day, it will inspire them to try new teaching methods. Capitalism 101.
How else will the university administrators know which teachers are actually valuable and liked?
I’ll see you guys in class. You know, if there’s time.
