Study­ing Again…

I was almost late for my first class.

I had left home on time but I was lost on the huge cam­pus and none of the stu­dents I stopped to ask for direc­tions seemed to know the loca­tion of my build­ing. I even­tu­ally found it a cou­ple of min­utes before my class was due to start.

I hate being late. Back in France, if you were late for class, you could be sure you’d be sin­gled out and made fun of. My best friend, who was never on time, was a n excuses spe­cial­ist. My Chi­nese teacher would always ask her stand up in front of the class and make her explain in Chi­nese why she was late — I bet she still remem­ber how to say “对不起，我又迟到了” (“sorry, I’m late again” in Chi­nese), even though she prob­a­bly hasn’t spo­ken the lan­guage in eight years.

I took a seat in the class and waited. The teacher was him­self an hour late. I guess a few min­utes wouldn’t have mat­tered, then.

The way peo­ple behave in class never cease to amaze me. The macro­eco­nomic class I took this sum­mer was quite small. My best guess is we were about forty stu­dents, in a nor­mal class­room, not an amphithe­ater. There­fore, we were all sat pretty close and the teacher was right in front of us.

I soon real­ized being late appar­ently didn’t mat­ter. Stu­dents would arrive ten, twenty min­utes late, some­times car­ry­ing their bikes with them to class, and sit down with­out excus­ing them­selves. The teacher him­self was late for almost each class, mut­ter­ing that the cam­pus was to big every time he stepped into the class, vis­i­bly out of breath.

But not only stu­dents were late, it was also appar­ently okay to get up in the mid­dle of the class to go to the bath­room or take a phone call. The class was three hours long with a break in the mid­dle, yet it wasn’t enough. Now I agree, the break was pretty short, espe­cially if you had a ques­tion for the teacher (and had to have a smoke because between us, macro­eco­nom­ics isn’t so fun). But I had never seen peo­ple get­ting up, leave and then come back in class before.

I went to an intro­duc­tion class a few weeks ago. A few min­utes into it, it became appar­ent that I would have a con­flict of sched­ule since there were manda­tory dis­cus­sion groups in addi­tion of the class that had not been men­tioned on the offi­cial sched­ule. I decided to wait the break to leave, since I wasn’t going to take the class. Five min­utes after the teach laid out the main require­ments for the class (a research project, two tests), stu­dents just left. And when I said stu­dents left, just imag­ine a packed amphithe­aters where at least 75% of the peo­ple take their stuffs and walk to the door, while the teacher is still mid-sentence! Okay… so appar­ently I wasn’t the only one drop­ping that class.

This seem to be a local trend: when­ever the class is bor­ing, when­ever stu­dents have some­thing to do or when­ever they sim­ply don’t care, they leave the class. No mat­ter when, no mat­ter how. In France, when the class was bor­ing, we would be equally impo­lite, I guess: we would chat, pass notes to each other, draw on a piece of paper or just day­dream. Yet, no one would ever dream of leav­ing the class — that is, if you ever wanted to attend the class again. It would be seen as extremely impo­lite and the pro­fes­sor wouldn’t hes­i­tate to sin­gle the poor soul out.

But the atmos­phere in class is very relax in Canada. Almost too much for my lik­ing. For exam­ple, stu­dents eat: not stuffs like cereal bars because they are hun­gry and after all, it’s been a long day. No, they eat their meal in class. I sat by a women who ate a Sub­way sand­wich dur­ing my last class. Weird. A lot of stu­dents also bring their lap­top and almost none of them use them to take note. I know, I’m sit­ting in the back and I can see the screen. MSN, cook­ing recipes, social medias… this has noth­ing to do with the class, does it? I mean, it’s not like they bother any­one, but why would you show up for class if you don’t plan to lis­ten, since most of the lec­tures are not compulsory?

Attend­ing uni­ver­sity in Canada is slowly turn­ing into a soci­o­log­i­cal expe­ri­ence for me!

Related posts:

1. The Teacher And The Test Dilemna
2. The Alien Student
3. On Cam­pus (Part II)
4. On Cam­pus (Part III)
5. Walk­ing on Thin Ice