Here are the results of yesterday’s poll, as of about 10pm Eastern. Blue bars are the fraction of respondents saying that a given behavior (wearing hats, eating in class, drinking in class, leaving class to go to the bathroom) was acceptable, red bars the fraction saying it was unacceptable:
You can also see the results broken down by whether the respondents were faculty or students (solid bars are student responses, striped bars faculty):
It’s interesting to see how uniformly permissive my readers are, though that may simply reflect the science-y tilt of my readership. When the topic comes up in faculty discussions, science and engineering faculty tend to lean more toward allowing students to do whatever they like, while humanities faculty tend to be slightly more restrictive.
I think this split reflects the different styles of classes favored by the different disciplines, at least in the small-liberal-arts-college setting where I teach. Science and engineering classes tend to involve a good deal of lecturing, because that’s the nature of the disciplines: the courses are built around transferring factual information from faculty to students. There’s very little point in discussing how students feel about the conservation of energy– so long as the laws of physics are invariant in time, we’re stuck with it. In the humanities, on the other hand, classes tend to be much more discussion-oriented, with many faculty going to great lengths to avoid anything that smacks of a traditional lecture.
That difference is reflected in the attitudes toward student behaviors. If you’re teaching a lecture course, and a student wants to eat, drink, or wander out of the room to go to the bathroom, so long as they’re not hugely disruptive about it, they’re only hurting themselves. If you wander off and miss the part of the class where the professor works an example problem exactly like the one that will be on the test, it sucks for you, but the rest of the class is basically unaffected.
In a discussion class, on the other hand, there’s much less leeway. Leaving the room in the middle of a discussion changes the whole atmosphere. There’s practically no way for a student to both participate meaningfully in the class and also take an unscheduled bathroom break. As a result, those faculty members tend to have a lower threshold regarding potentially disruptive behavior.
Personally, I’m pretty laid-back about all of these. I have no problem with hats (other than the fact that some of my male students wear hats so regularly that I have trouble recognizing them without a hat), I don’t care if students eat and drink so long as they don’t make a huge production of it and disturb other students, and I don’t stop people from leaving class if they need to.
(On one memorable occasion, with two weeks to go in the term, a student packed up his books with twenty minutes to go in the class, and walked out. He never turned up again that term. That was the only time I recall students commenting on another student leaving the room– a couple of them asked “Hey, can we do that, too?”)
I’m kind of amused by the fact that the question with the strongest “Yes” response from all groups is the bathroom one. Of all the behaviors listed, that’s the one I come closest to wanting to forbid, mostly because it sometimes throws me off for a beat or two when a student gets up and walks out. I’ve never actually done anything about it, but it’s the one that bugs me the most.
As far as the others go, I don’t forbid hats, even during quizzes and exams. I tend to provide formula sheets, or even allow students to make their own, so there’s really nothing they could write on the brim of a ball cap that would be worth the bother, and the classes I teach are small enough that it would take more than a hat to hide wandering eyes.
As to food and drink, I frequently went to morning classes with a cinnamon roll and a large Coke from the snack bar when I was a student, so it would feel kind of hypocritical to forbid my students from doing the same. I might say something if a student started loudly crunching Doritos, or sat down to tuck into a bowl of natto, but I’ve never had the issue come up.
Of course, as noted above, I mostly teach lecture classes, so I don’t have that many concerns about disrupting the flow of the class. And as noted by one anonymous student commenter a few terms ago, I am “loud and intense,” so I don’t have to worry too much about controlling the class. Other people who are naturally a little quieter (or just smaller) may feel a stronger need to establish ground rules for the classroom.