I Learned Something Today

I was never fortunate enough to go to university and that's the biggest regret of my life.  Therefore, I had no idea that it was acceptable for a student to take over a class for a 10 minute rant.  I'm supposing that this student felt every other student in her class agreed with her choice of topic but maybe not.  She was a native student trying to correct her professor about what really happened to the native population 200 years ago.  He didn't agree with her, apparently, and that's why she asserted herself maybe a little too aggressively.

If I was a student in that class, having paid high tuition, I don't think I'd take kindly to a native student (who had paid NO tuition) taking over the class.  I would love to hear her position but not if she wouldn't shut up after a decent amount of time.

It makes sense for a student to do their research and come up with a different view than their professor but, if the professor is misinformed, maybe the student is also.  She said she got some of her information from her family.  In any case, the other students apparently didn't agree with her, either, so she was being unfair to them by taking up so much of their time.

Everybody seems to want to get up on a soap box to "educate" us and insist we agree with them and their cause.  That's okay if their audience has the option to walk away but not if they're being held hostage.  My soap box is this blog which very few people read and that's fine with me because I know I'm probably wrong about a lot of things I write.  

For instance, I believe the native population should have been able to pull themselves up out of poverty by now instead of blaming the white people for what happened 200 years ago.  A smart native, like this girl, would have taken advantage of the free university education offered to them but few have done so.  A smart native would have built up their community instead of so many turning to alcohol and being unemployed (by their own count, only 17% of Canadian natives are employed).  A smart native would have assimilated into the Canadian or American culture, adding their own to it.  A country with a diversity of cultures that happily co-exist is beneficial to everyone.

Anyway, a professor must be in control of what goes on in their classroom and, if a student is out of line, they're a detriment to the class as a whole.  If the professor doesn't know his/her stuff, the student might be better off dropping out of that class.