Ryerson profs threaten to walk out on their unruly students
Two engineering professors at Ryerson University have had enough of their unruly first-year students. After enduring weeks of disruptions from music playing laptops, constant talking and even a few paper airplanes, Robert Gossage and Andrew McWilliams are threatening to walk out on their classes.
In a posting on a university website, the two professors announced that they will be employing a “three strike” policy for their first-year chemistry courses. “After three warnings the professor would walk out and it would be up to students to learn the rest of the lecture material on their own,” the Eyeopener reported. Gossage and McWilliams also pledged to raise the difficulty of exam questions because “the class appeared to know the material well enough so as not to listen during lecture.”
Student conduct officer, Mickey Cirak, said the professors would be advised to address the problem in a more conventional way. “The approaches that can be used range anywhere from speaking to the entire class, to putting expectations on the syllabus all the way to taking action with individual students and filing a formal complaint,” he said.