A huge selling point in education these days is class size. You've all heard the rhetoric. Smaller classes let students build relationships with their professors. Everyone gets more individual attention and stimulation. How can we ever expect our kids to learn biology if their professor doesn't know their middle name and favorite Brittney song?(like anyone could chose just one) Truth be told, I love stepping into a big lecture hall and melting into a sea of nameless faces. It's not that I don't want someone hand sowing seeds of inspiration and wonder in my intellectual garden so much as I enjoy the one way discrimination barrier lecture halls put between me and my professors. A close relationship with a professor can be great thing, but depending on the nature of the relationship it can also be equally destructive. As a student with ADHD I have experienced first hand the negative effects it can have on the relationship between student and professor. In the educational community there are certain standards for how "good" students behave. "Good" students sit up straight, look nice, pay attention, and ask lots of questions. Anyone who fails to follow this protocol couldn't possibly have a genuine interest in learning, right? From years of teaching sailing I know how personally insulting it can feel to be teaching an important lesson only to look up to see a kid not paying attention in class. "Doesn't he or she know I'm trying to help them?" "Do they not care how much work I put into this lesson?"
When I talk about discrimination I am not only referring to students with ADHD and other disabilities but any well intentioned student who doesn't look like the kid in a cereal commercial who just ate full and balanced breakfast. Lecture halls allow the incurable late comer to just grab a seat in the back, the hopelessly unorganized to fumble through backpacks un-frowned upon, and the perpetually unprepared to borrow a pen without the assumption that what they write with it will be of lesser quality.I have developed good relationships with professors in both large and small class sizes. Nobody stops you from sitting in the front of a lecture hall and asking lots of questions. It's not hard to stand out and foster a beneficial relationship with a professor if you are in the ten out of two hundred with a genuine interest in the subject matter. Lecture halls still allow for the sowing of those inspiration seeds college pamphlets try to portray, but more importantly they create a safe haven from the discriminating gardener.
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