Going to lectures

[raven]

I may, possibly, have misjudged American Girl. When you get her talking, she's actually quite nice. And I wanted to know if she had any more questions, or if I could help her with anything else, and she said yes, she had a question. Go ahead, I said.

"Tell me," she said, "do you people ever go to lectures?"

"Um," I said. "That depends."

The thing is, I know what it depends on for me - I would go to my compulsory ones if I had any, I go to the good ones (c.f. Morison and Pooley), and the later the lecture is in the day, generally the more likely I am to go to it. But I am curious, and procrastinating, and therefore spamming.



[Poll #668385]

Comments

[snowballjane.livejournal.com]

I know this makes me a sad, sad person but I went to quite a few lectures that weren't for my own courses (all Prof. Watson's modernism ones, because he was unmissably brilliant) and some in entirely other subjects (archaeology, which was my roommate's subject), just for fun.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Even if I hadn't been a PPEist, I'd have still gone to Morison and Pooley's General Philoshopy lectures, because they were that good. And I wanted to go to Latin lectures last term, but they wouldn't let me! So, yeah, I understand that. Other people's lectures sound so much more interesting anyway!

[biascut.livejournal.com]

I asked for permission to attend a seminar course, with all the reading, that I wasn't getting credit for because it was two of our fantastically brilliant professors and I really wanted to know about the Philosophical Aesthetic and Literary Theory. They were the only seminars I took really detailed notes for, as well. Though I'm still hopeless at any kind of philosophical discussion.

I didn't miss any seminars, but I considered lectures optional. I also counted a 9.15 lecture "attended" if I was wearing a fleece over pyjamas, sat at the back and went straight to sleep without even getting a pen and paper out. This is possibly not the sort of attendance that the university was shooting for.

Are you worried about the proposed attendance contracts, Iona?

[kuteki.livejournal.com]

I do go to most...only not the two this morning, or the econ ones with that guy whose voice makes me want to shoot myself. But I can actually see inside South School from my landing and feel terribly guilty if I don't go, unless I am sleeping, or writing a last minute essay... :D

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

That guy makes us all want to shoot ourselves. Ohgod he's so awful, I can never understand a single word he's saying.

You can see inside Schools! That amuses me more than it should.

[hathy-col.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy lectures. People sit and talk at me for an hour and I sit an absorb knowledge. It makes my life a happy place, and I have quite nice lectures about stuff I'm fascinated with.

Although 10am medieval history? Oh, that is painful. I do it because I love the subject.

They're not the be all and end all. A lot of what I do is the lectures, because the reading doesn't always make sense unless someone sensibly takes you through the basic timelines and the ideas. I think it's a history thing, though, because I feel awful when I skip a lecture. I have missed, um, five. Mostly through missing a train on a Sunday so mising my Monday morning, or on one memorable occasion waking up on Thursday at midday and flailing.

I hated Spanish and had no qualms missing it.

Russian I have no choice for, though, because I get no other tutorials so will have to go. Oh, yay.

It's odd, but you get away with not going to lectures so much more than we do. Might be a university thing.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Your lectures sound more interesting than mine, and also because you're not joint honours so there is less stuff that you're not interested in even in your own degree subject. Does that makse sense? I basically hate a third of everything I do because of economics

Oh, god. I have missed so many more than five, which makes me wonder if your lectures are just better than mine, because they do help you understand things and mine are a bit hit and miss in that respect.

It might be a university thing, and it might be something to do with the 300 PPEists round and about. With so many, I guess no-one notices if there's people missing, plus each college does do things in a different orde so lectures are relevant for different people.

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

10 in Upper College Hall? That'd be why I have very little clue about the Carolingians.

[robette-wild.livejournal.com]

:D I said I attended most of mine... I think this averages out: I missed about two thirds of last term's lectures but I've been to every single one this term (apart from the ones we were told not to go to, for obvious reasons). And I feel I'm justifiably proud of myself for that, since we had eight 9am lectures in the first two weeks. :O (Honestly, if we'd wanted that, we'd all have done chemistry.)

Next year I want to go to these Morison and Pooley lectures, just to see what it's all about.

I mean, what they're all about, as well as the whole 'what's-it-all-about' philosophy angle.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Heee. Nine am lectures! That's awful! I seem to remember you sleeping through midday ones last term! *g*

You must go to them, for both angles. :) They are LOVE in so many different ways.

[the-acrobat.livejournal.com]

Lectures.
When I was an undergraduate, I had a policy that I could miss one lecture per class per week. So if we had lectures 3 times a week, I had to go to 2.
Usually when I did go, I sat at the back and wrote M*A*S*H fanfiction or slept.
I didn't make myself very popular.
I dropped any course that required me to be on campus before 10:00 a.m. unless it was essential in order to graduate.
When I was an undergraduate, my seminar policy was that I could miss one per term. And that included sick days. Seminars might be the only reason I didn't drop out of university and become a career barista or something.
Now I always go to class, and I almost always go to my students' lectures (although I'm sometimes late), which is painful. I keep several Sudokus in my notebook which prevent me from dying of boredom, but allow me to know enough about what was said in lecture that I know what my students - who never do the readings, those jerks - will know about in tutorial on Friday so I know what to talk about. When I get bored of Sudoku and it gets too easy, I'll probably teach myself to do cryptic crosswords or something.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

So, basically, you get better as you get older and more important? :) I think I may bear that in mind, given that I am a lowest-of-the-low first year at the moment.

You know, I can't do Sudokus. I just don't have the relevant brain-bits, I think. It makes me feel rather inadequate when on public transport.

[ladyfalcon.livejournal.com]

At the two colleges I've attended, there's always been some sort of policy, either put in place by the professors or the school itself, that after a certain number of missed lectures, you begin to get points off on your final class grade. Where I am now, the only leeway you have is that sometimes you can get a lenient professor who gives you ten misses or something, but of course those then become the professors who won't accept 'I had my appendix out' as an excuse for why you missed that 11th day.

In fact, at the orientations I went to, the single biggest thing they stressed about what you should do when you get to college is GO TO CLASS. At the university I attended particularly, they made a big deal of the fact that five lectures at three hours a week each plus the "magic number" of studying hours (it's reccommended in every book that you read on college that you spend three hours out-of-class studying for every one hour in-class), that that time only worked out to be forty hours a week, which is the same as a full-time job. So they encouraged looking at college as your job, and making class-going and studying your major priority.

And I have to say, at the university, I didn't go to class, and while I didn't actually fail out I had straight C's and a few D's, and my parents refused to pay for any more, which is the story of How I Ended Up in Junior College. Where I now go to class every. single. time. (although I skipped one yesterday just because).

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I begin to suspect that the system over there must be quite a bit different, because the prevailing culture round here is so very different. I mean, I don't actually get assessed during termtime at all, at least not formally (scribbles in essay margins is what we get the most of). Even my first-year exams have no bearing on my final degree class, so I guess we've been made lazy. I should be more self-motivated, I know, but I do a lot of work without going to lectures which is how I rationalise it to myself.

In short, you make me feel bad. *g*

[casirafics.livejournal.com]

In my entire career at zee lovely University of Gigantitude, I intentionally ditched class a grand total of... once. And that was when I'd had a meeting with the teacher earlier in the day anyway, so I preemptively got the day's material from her then.

I am sometimes too much of a goody-two-shoes for my own good. ;)

(Then again, I did get into the most prestigious honor society in the nation, so I suppose it all works out....)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

zee lovely University of Gigantitude

That made me giggle far too much.

And, oh god, you make me feel like an awful excuse for a human being. *goes off to die quietly*

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

One time I only went to 7 out of a possible 35 lectures. That may be why I have a gap that contains a wee bit of Martin Luther but otherwise paints history as something of a blank between Columbus and George III. "European Wars of Religion"? What European Wars of Religion?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*g* 7 out of 35! At last, my type of person! (I only do marginally better than this, I think.)

[that_mireille]

I went to lectures... sometimes. When I was studying English, I had a sociology course where I went the first day, and then for exams. So maybe five times out of thirty.

When I was doing computer science, I always went to one professor's classes (and when I say "always," I mean "usually") because I liked them, but others, I would miss pretty often.

I do not count the spring of 2005 when I was not allowed to stand up for more than five minutes at a time and therefore went to nothing.

I did very well in both degrees, for the record...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

This resembles my approach, pretty much. Go to all of them in the first week to check them out, and henceforth go to the useful ones and the good ones.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I'm a bad person. Last semester I discovered the wonder that is skipping classes in favor of sleep, and since then, I've had a really hard time dragging myself out of bed at all. Ever. For anything. Lucky for me, most of my classes have some kind of limit on absences, after which you're penalized, so I'm forced to go to a lot. (Although I still managed to miss about a third of all my art history classes last semester. The problem is that I have yet to see any consequences--grades or otherwise--for skipping, so I have little incentive to wake up anymore.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the thing, isn't it. Sleep is good, and lectures are not, and when mine are all optional anyway, it just doesn't seem worth it. You're really not a bad person. At all. I haven't skipped any classes because I have had a grand total of, um, seven of them since I arrived in Oxford. So I've gone to every single one and felt virtuous. Beyond that, yes, I suck. But I figure that as you say, there are no actual consequences, then neither of us suck all that much.

[kismeteve.livejournal.com]

Despite the fact that my classes are mind-numbingly boring, I have to go to all of them since my university has an attendance policy. Three absences and your grade gets cut. Some professors can actually fail you if you have three absences. I can kind of get away with skipping my lingusitics and US history lectures if I sign in and then sneak out the back, but I'm waiting until the weather gets nicer to do so.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Sneaking out the back! I like that. :) But failing you because of absences, don't like that so much. Even if you did spectacularly in every other way?

[rhipowered.livejournal.com]

We Americans need to stop saying 'you people'.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm thinking she meant "you Balliol PPEists" rather than "you British people", but, really, the former are fully deserving of any epithet you care to throw at them.

[ex-spockette108.livejournal.com]

I *try* to go to all my lectures, but don't quite manage it. I think so long as you're getting the work done anyway, they're not really required. I think I need to go to my lectures more often this semester, as last time round, I could coast because I'd covered that particular time period in my Highers or whatever, but now, everything is NEW so I'll have to learn things this time.

I don't think I'm ever going to miss a single Linguistics lecture, though - despite them being in the CHEMISTRY BUILDING, and me having a class in the Quad immediately after (that gives me about 5 minutes to walk about a mile. ARGH) - as my lecturers are utterly fab. One of them is called SARAH-JANE SMITH, and the other one is on crack - whilst explaining how animals communicate, she did impressions of her cat for about 15 minutes. "This is the noise my cat makes when she comes home with a mouse! *meowmeowmeow* And this is the noise she makes when she comes home with a vole! *meowmeowmeow* And this is the noise she makes when she wants me to stop whatever I'm doing and start paying attention to her *meowmeowmeow* Would you like to see a picture of her? I have a few in my wallet, I'll go and get them!" So much fun!

So, yeah. I go to lectures when I actually have to in order to learn something, but I guess if you can accomplish the same on your own, there's not much point to showing up.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Amen. Going to them if they accomplish something seems to be the sensible way.

And, OMG, OMG, I want to be taught by Sarah Jane Smith! (seriously, that is just amazing). And crazy cat ladies too!

[slasheuse.livejournal.com]

IONA.

Your friend. Sky/Skye. The one who was in the play and I KNOW it is rude of me not to spell his name correctly, but i am IN HASTE (also a towel, quel image) but WOULD HE LIKE ANOTHER ROLE. Because frankly we have three roles and he is certain to get one. HT06 O'Reilly 6th week, look even if he says no, my mobile number is 07746815494, pleasepleasepleaseplease get him to call it please. Also come to Q. Drinks tonight!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I'll try! He's at a rehearsal tonight, so I'll pitch it to him when he gets back. Can't do Q. drinks tonight! Too much reading!

[apestaartje.livejournal.com]

Does it make me a terrible person if I say I'm not entirely sure if what I'm doing is an art or a science? We get a Bachelor or a Master of Science in the criminology but it's mostly arts since all subjects are law, sociology, psychology and politics related and not really scientificy. That's why I picked both. And some people have apparently said it should be called an Arts but maybe there weren't enough sciences and since it's called criminological sciences they went with that.

I'm also an evil person because I didn't go to any of my fridaynight lectures last sememster and I didn't go to hardly any of my wednesday morning ones. I don't think I went to any of my tuesday morning ones either. Oops. But they shouldn't put everything you need on the internet if they want people to go.

(I would use my "university (fear)" icon now but my icons expired earlier today so you'll have to pretend I'm using that one.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, sort of like maths, which I put separately because of the endless debates about whether it's an art or a science. I personally think it's neither. Next time I post a poll of this sort, there shall be a criminology radio button just for you.

I think that, too! i get handouts online and then I just... don't go. It's quite depressing, really, what the internet does to your motivation. :)

[apestaartje.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I read that question wrong there. I thought it said "what did you do if you didn't have lectures" instead of what it actually says. Which proves I should read things more than once. So, uhm, ignore my answer.

After reading the comments I'm a bit confused. What's the difference between lectures and seminars? We just call them classes.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Seminars are classes, I think. Lectures are when one guy stands at front of the room for forty-five minutes and talks at you.

[elanorkat.livejournal.com]

I went to about 70% of mine, waaay back when I was an undergrad. I did miss almost an entire course (Roman Historyzzz) and I know for a fact that was my worst finals paper...

Thing is, I know that at Oxford, there's far more of a tutorial system than there is in most other universities. I was at Reading for, guh, nine years, and if you didn't go to the lectures, you really didn't have a clue what was going on. Yes, there were course handouts detailing reading, but I think only the sharpest knives in the drawer could have taken a course entirely through private study and come out with really good results.

Of course, speaking as *cough* an ex-lecturer, it pains me that people don't go to all their lectures! :-D Mind you, I think lecturers make even more fuss than students do about having to turn up for 9am - dare I say it, even 10am - lectures! God, I'm glad I don't have to do that any more!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

The Oxford tutorial system does make things different, it's true. But to be fair, most of what I learn comes from private study. I don't know if this is the most effective means or what, but lectures don't always handle it, and the tutorials are for after you've done the reading, so to speak. It's just, well, lots of reading. Which is why I guess you "read" for a degree here.

Hey, another lecturer! (That makes three in this thread!) What's your subject?

drawn in from my friendsfriends page . . .

[living-yen.livejournal.com]

..not that i'm avoiding studying or anything :P

what would you classify a medical(ish)professional training as? I said science, but I'll (hopefully) get a BMed at the end of it (but not to call myself doctor).

placements I'd fail if I didn't go to the required hours of, but computer tutorials that are just working through a handout? zzz! with lectures it depends on many things (the lecturer, the subject, how much sleep I've had)

I have two 9ams, which is pretty good (4 in first year and 3 last year)I make it to less of those . . .and my attendence at Research Methods is fairly low but who can blame me?

Re: drawn in from my friendsfriends page . . .

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Science, definitely. I'm using the very broadest categories here. (And I was almost a medic, myself; I used to call myself a scientist back in more innocent days!)

Hey, I don't blame you at all. You can see above that for me to do so would involve hypocrisy of the highest order.

[bekkypk.livejournal.com]

I think I was good and didn't miss a lecture (unless I was sick - and once we sat in the smoking room for break and my head started spinning so badly I had to go home) until a coupel of months before I left - at which point I was upset and generally not bothered. It was too hot, anyway, though not as hot as England was, and blimey I miss the sea breeze at Portobello I tell you...
xx

[calapine.livejournal.com]

Maths? Arts? Science? Where is law, oh my?!

And going to lectures is completely optional. I gave up on European Law after the first two weeks due to great hatred of subject and everything was smashing, yes.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Is law not an arts subject? I confess my ignorance on the subject.

(I must also confess peculiar interest in European law. I do apologise.)