When going about my day at University I always try to be polite to my fellow students, to staff in the shops and to lecturers. I mean, let’s face it, most people at the University have enough to be worrying about without having to deal with rudeness as well. Hence I was rather shocked to receive a very aggressive email from a lecturer last week. It was sent to all the students enrolled on one of his modules (as well as all Politics with Economics students) as something of a warning.
Whilst most lecturers are keen to make their subject appealing and actually want to have some students in their class, it seems that this email was sent with the intention of ‘scaring off’ many of the students considering taking his unit.
Firstly, he draws attention to the lecture’s 8:15 start time and states that ‘No latecomers will be tolerated, if you are not in the lecture room at 8:15 am you will not be allowed in the room and anyone attempting to enter will be asked to leave. This will be rigorously enforced to prevent continuous disturbance of the lecture by students arriving late for no reason other than their inability and/or unwillingness to make an effort to attend on time’.
He goes on to state that he knows that the buses ‘are late more often than not and unreliable (after all this is England)’. Is this angry tone really necessary? Personally, I hate lateness and I think that it is incredibly rude when the same students stroll in at half past the hour every week and disrupt the lecture. However, sometimes lateness is unavoidable, and it is incredibly unfair to say that every student arriving at 8:20 rather than 8:15 has to miss the entire lecture. Buses break down, traffic jams occur and roads get closed; essentially there are things beyond the control of the student that can make them late for a lecture. This is especially true for 8:15 lectures when, unless you leave home at 6am every morning on the off chance that something will slow your journey down, then there is the possibility that you will be held up and arrive late. Similarly I find his snide ‘this is England after all’ comment incredibly offensive; by the sounds of his email he doesn’t much like England and doesn't much like students, therefore I find it quite odd that he has chosen to be a lecturer at an English university…
As his obnoxious email continues he informs his students that the average mark has, in the past, often been below 60% and that ‘students mainly concerned about their marks should reconsider whether they want to take this unit’. ‘Students mainly concerned about their marks’?? Is it a bad thing to be concerned about your marks? I think that every hardworking student at this University is probably ‘mainly concerned about their marks’, and I for one would be loath to take this module knowing that the lecturer did not expect the average mark of his class to be above 60% and who nonchalantly states that there also tends to be a ‘significant number of fails’. I think that perhaps he had ought to consider the quality of his teaching if he is not expecting to be able to get all the students to pass and for the average to be above 60%.
He launches into another rant about students from different degree programmes, forbidding Politics with Economics students and ‘with management’/‘with business’ degree students from taking the course ‘under any circumstances’ and promising to ignore any emails from them. He then jollily rounds off his email by stating that ‘any student objecting to any of the above should change their choice of unit and take a unit that is more suitable to their degree of work commitment’. Personally, I am a very committed student and am determined to do well in my degree and that would be exactly why I would not take this unit or any other unit taught by this lecturer.
However I can happily say that given the aggressiveness of this email I would think that this lecturer should have no problem with students turning up late to his class, I think that instead he had ought to be concerned about them not turning up at all.
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