Say it with me: EVERYONE DOES NOT LEARN THE SAME WAY.
Professors these days do not understand how hard it is to have crippling anxiety in college. Balancing school full-time and a job is already difficult enough, anxiety just complicates things. If you have social anxiety, the simplest interactions with your peers make your palms sweaty and your heart race. To some degree, you expect this since college is chock-full of strangers you've never met and will hopefully never see again.
But your 8am is literally the LAST place (and time) you want to stress out about your disorder.
When you allot a whopping 10% of our final grade as "Class Participation," you are making it unnecessarily difficult for your students. WHY DO PROFESSORS DO THIS?! Think about it: if you ask a question, and no one in the class answers, we clearly don’t know the answer. It is NOT the time to start calling on random kids who look scared. It is also not the time to take out the roll and call the first name you see.
Stop doing this!
Please know that when students sit on the sides of the classroom, it's for a reason. Maybe they stayed out all night with their friends, or maybe it’s because they aren't morning people and don’t want to say a word before 10am. They could also have been diagnosed with Anxiety Disorder. It doesn’t matter. If I don’t raise my hand….don’t call on me.
There is nothing worse than sitting in a class with a bunch of introverted college students who didn’t do the assigned reading. In Gen Ed classes, you can at least count on being in a big lecture hall with that *one* kid who won’t shut up. Thanks kid.
Other times, you are stuck in a classroom with a student-teacher ratio of 19:1. Meaning 19 pairs of eyeballs avoiding yours while you scan the room looking for your next victim.
Some of us go to therapy for this. Some students legitimately have to prepare themselves to walk into a class that has already started, knowing all eyes will be on them when they walk in. Some of us overthink our answers even when we know they are correct. And some of us get knots in our stomach at the thought of speaking in front of people.
To all the teachers out there, the masochists who think grading class participation helps us learn: EVERYONE DOES NOT LEARN THE SAME WAY.
Just let me take the test and go. Thanks.
