BY JANE FERNANDEZ
“Awesome! Class is cancelled, let’s go hang out!” We might say this to ourselves or hear this from one of our classmates as we throw a little mental party in our heads, but do we really think about the consequences of a canceled class?
Should we really take those consequences for granted and let our excitement take a toll on our education? From my past experiences, I have always had a class that was canceled at least three times in a semester but I never really thought much about it.
Last week, I experienced the opposite feelings with my speech class. As I reached to open the classroom door I noticed the lights were off, which I found to be odd.
As I looked up by the door hoping to see a note from the teacher asking us to meet him somewhere else, I noticed a cancellation notice. I was shocked to find a class to be cancelled this early in the semester so I wasn’t expecting it.
In past semesters I would not have even looked inside the classroom to double check, but this time I did and I thought of all the reasons why I didn’t want my class to be canceled.
Not only did I feel as if the teacher had failed on us for not showing up, but I also felt as if I was throwing my money away.
I thought, “What if this teacher misses class another few times this semester, and my other teachers miss class this semester as well, how much money will I be throwing away on lectures that never happened.”
Another reason class cancellations are nothing to be excited about is because we tend to forget the lecture from days before.
That means the teacher will have to re-explain the lecture and we will be wasting more class time on top of being jammed with information from two, sometimes three lectures.
What I did not value past semesters was beginning to bother me, and I sure hoped it bothered my classmates enough to want to think about skipping class when the teacher was available.
“I don’t know if to feel happy or sad about it,” said one of my classmates as we walked away from the empty classroom.
We might think a break from a class, once in a while, would not be bad but we have to keep in mind that a canceled class is more of a disadvantage than we find it to be.
Although we might get to leave earlier or hang out with a friend, we are wasting valuable education time that we are paying for.