Today I address the age old question of "What happens when the professor for a class fails to show up".

Typically most students employ a fifteen minute rule where after fifteen minutes they run out of the door feeling justified and that they have waited long enough. In the administrative policy class this year we took a different approach.

When our professor who is normally a bit late failed to turn up we were polite and just kept sitting around waiting for something to happen. After another ten minutes I checked to see if he emailed the class foretelling his absence, but that was fruitless. A search of his phone numbers yielded no numbers that got a response. Some students started to get up to leave at this point and I took matters into my own hands.

I went to the white board and wrote down the names of the students that left and the time. I am normally the last to leave in a situation like this so I thought it would be interesting to see how quickly everyone left. This seemed to cheer up a few classmates who were staying behind in that this was no longer just a class, it was a competition.

This class we were supposed to be discussing a bio of Ted Turner and his management prowess (or lack thereof). Typically exercises like this tend not to excite students, but Steve really took to the article so he started to lead the class for a while. He tried to get a discussion going but he quickly found out that there was a reason why the professor often closely followed his pre-prepared notes - these discussions were slow to get going and often had a limited lifespan.

After a few short minutes of discussion and analysis with everyone randomly blurting out what came to mind, we decided to abandon the discussion of Ted Turner in favour of simply watching some educational videos of Ted, namely the Robot Chicken episode with Ted Turner as Captain Planet.

At this point there was no going back to the discussion and the remainder of the class was spent watching random youtube videos. We all hoped that any minute our professor would burst through the door forty five minutes late and assign us all some participation marks for patiently waiting for him. Sadly this ideal scenario never occurred.

We started to become a bit annoyed that our professor had not shown up and the prospect of his presence was becoming smaller every minute. We drafted a letter to the professor at this point explaining our feelings, but in the end decided to write a letter to the following class (which has the same professor) alerting them to our plight.

In the end I was impressed that we actually got a small discussion going and a good number of students stayed nearly the entire class. The one thing I learned is that even if the students are about to graduate, getting them to run a class is still a tall order.