Going to the Bathroom: a student's right?

[hoosier]

Going to the Bathroom

By Terry Caesar

The other day I had my composition students in groups, ready to “peer edit,” according to the latest pedagogy. Suddenly one student just got up, and started for the door. I glared at her. “Just going to the bathroom,” she airly explained. I did not reply.

Wrong. I should have said or done something. We cannot have students wandering out of our classrooms at will. That way lies — what? High school? Or do they ask permission from the teacher first in high school? Elementary school? This is where they are presumably taught to ask, and certainly where they must learn to discipline their bodily functions.

Most likely my student did not have to go to the bathroom. She just wanted to stroll a bit before bending to the task at hand. Another student might have been more aggressive, in order to demonstrate her dislike of the task, if not school itself. But in any case, what to do? If doing nothing seems wrong, shouting at the student to sit down does not seem right.

I have always thought of the bathroom as marking the moment of discipline in the college classroom. Any student mention of the bathroom, whether in good faith or not, becomes as impossible to deal with as it is inescapable. When students do anything in the classroom that merits the exercise of faculty discipline, professors are on their own. The easiest thing for everybody to do is to look the other way. There are few rules, unlike those in place for elementary, middle, and high school teachers.

Even if a student asks permission to go to the bathroom, what I want to reply is, “Don’t put me in the position of having to answer such a question.” But of course the teacher, as a teacher, is precisely in such a position — on every educational level. Some provocations we professors acknowledge. Some we do not. Let the bathroom represent one we do not because it has to do with our authority over the student body.

This authority is at present elaborately monitored when it comes to sex. However, the prohibitions and penalties regarding sex are strikingly in contrast to their absence regarding anything else having to do with the student body. How can we explain this? After all, we can readily acknowledge that, outside or inside the classroom, no body remains entirely still, stable and quiescent.

It seems to me that on the college level we are all expected to be intellects. Hence, the discipline we exercise over our desires is ultimately no different than that we exercise over our bodily functions. Nonetheless, there is a difference, and that difference becomes quite dramatic in a classroom, which is, after all, the basic scene of instruction in formal education. The necessity to go to the bathroom disrupts this scene.

This is another way of saying, it seems to me, that the classroom can be disrupted. In practice, it matters how, and so the student who talks or mutters, rustles paper or puts his or her head down on the desk, may not be as bad as the one who interrupts a lecture without raising a hand, spreads out and slowly eats a whole sandwich, or leaves the classroom and returns repeatedly. In principle, though, any disruption calls for some response from the teacher.

What makes going to the bathroom so distinctive and uncomfortable is that, while still disruptive, it partakes of some necessity that is socially if not pedagogically acceptable. In most other cases, the professor can understandably lift a cry to the heavens, bemoaning how university life used to be, before hordes of student barbarians broke through the gates, with their plastic slurppies, their taco chips, their baggy clothes and their baggy values. But the bathroom we have always with us.

Do we not? The trouble is, if we have, why do I not remember a student ever leaving the classroom to go to the bathroom during my own college years? (Much less sleeping or eating.) Once during graduate school I remember a student was asked to leave, because he would not stop talking to the person next to him. He left immediately. The rest of us could not have been more shocked than if he had got up suddenly and squatted in front of his chair.

During my more than 30 subsequent years as a professor I remember a few students pleading bodily necessity in asking permission to leave. The first was a male, who basked in his boldness after he asked. I told him, “sure, you can go, but don’t come back.” Then it seemed he didn’t have to go so urgently after all. I insisted, saying that I couldn’t live with either his urethra or his anus on my conscience. The rest of the class laughed. Those were the days.

The rest of the students who pleaded have been more serious, more apparently stricken, and all female. Is the moment of the bathroom in fact a gendered one? It appears to be. Males are expected to exercise control over their bodily functions as an expression of being “male.” Are females not expected to exercise the same control so strenuously, as a contrary expression of being “female"? Of course, whether or not this is true, female students if they either want to or must leave class can usually draw on a degree of mystified male latitude for anything to do with menstruation.

We return to the body, the repressed question of discipline in the college classroom, and what, if anything, to conclude. Other than recognizing the question, there is, I would argue, nothing to conclude.

Different professors will respond in different ways to classroom disruptions, and even to the same disruption represented by going to the bathroom. Some responses will be better than others, and some will probably always be hapless. So be it.

Certainly more rules and regulation about student behavior in class or teacher responsibility to discipline that behavior will only result in universities becoming more like high schools than they are. Already the specter of the assistant dean haunts college halls like the principal or the superintendent, and students recognize this. The more clever know that they can secure a hearing in the dean’s office about virtually anything to do with their teachers.

The other day I heard of a teacher who is being e-mailed by one of her students from the previous semester. The student is demanding an explanation of her grade, and has stated that she will go to the dean if a satisfactory justification is not forthcoming. Presumably she knows that the institution (a small liberal arts college) requires that in such cases the student must first meet with the teacher and the department chair, prior to a meeting with the dean.

Of course the student wants her grade changed. The surprising thing is this: she wants it not an A- but an A. When I last heard, the student was still e-mailing, while the teacher, in order to avoid the chair, not to mention the dean, was considering just changing the grade, to hell with it. How to hear this and not long again for the days when, well, when students, even college students, asked permission from their teachers to go to the bathroom? But those days are gone.

What we have now is a cultural dispensation where the precious space of the classroom has been breached by everything from television monitors to Subway sandwiches and cellphones. At local levels, in specific ways, it still might be possible to dispute, contest, or restrict the circumstances. But not their larger authority. One may as well try to wish away e-mail, if not assistant deans. The route from inside the classroom to outside (and back again) is firmly and irrevocably in place inside higher education.

The bathroom now has a role, albeit a minor one, in this place. Why worry about it, from the student point of view? If you are in class, and you have to go, just go, or use it as an excuse to go. Meanwhile, there may be an air of nostalgia from the point of view of a teacher about the very idea of a student asking permission. Perhaps I said nothing not only because I felt so baffled by the student who just got up the other day. I may have suddenly felt wistful. The very idea of “disciplining” her in some way, once so distasteful, now seemed utterly charming and even sweetly poignant.


Terry Caesar is the author or co-editor of seven books, including three on academic life, the most recent being Traveling Through the Boondocks.

_

[astroAPhi]

I can't decide if this is satire or if this guy is completely wacked.

[BSUPhiSig'92]

My guess is a little of both.

[DeltAlum]

Greek Life?

[AXO Alum]

Originally posted by astroAPhi
I can't decide if this is satire or if this guy is completely wacked.

I'll vote for the whacked part!

I clearly remember the first day of many of my college classes - the professors most always mentioned "and if you need a restroom break, by all means go -- don't hold up my class to ask my permission"

I also had one great prof that said on the first day "if you feel sleepy - get up and stand at the back of the classroom. I will not care, and you will not disrupt others. If, however, you fall asleep in my class you get one warning. The second time you are automatically dropped from this class." And HE DID IT! One girl fell asleep the 2nd time and he woke her up and said "get out and I'll process your withdrawal slip this afternoon" -- and he kicked her out. It was very shocking, but not something I ever forgot (nor did I fall asleep in his class!)

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally posted by AXO Alum
I'll vote for the whacked part!

I clearly remember the first day of many of my college classes - the professors most always mentioned "and if you need a restroom break, by all means go -- don't hold up my class to ask my permission"

I'm surprised your professor even addressed that. None of my professors ever did and I never do with my students.

This guy seems wacky but it may have to do with the student body...that may be wacky.

[33girl]

This is the same Dr Caesar that used to be at Clarion and I never had him, but he is definitely a passenger on the S. S. Whacked.

He continually insulted Clarion in his writings and referred to it as a "second rate" school (but obviously he had no problem taking home a first rate paycheck). He kept saying it was satire, but as I've said before, if you have to explain that it's satire it a) isn't very good satire or b) you mean what you were saying and say it was satire to try to dig your butt out of a hole.

Now I see what Clarion's problem was - we just didn't think enough about students peeing!

Prime example of self-indulgent academiac.

[DGMarie]

without stating all of the obvious reasons why a female student might need to be excused to use the restroom, I am reminded in graduate school of a short lived policy of bathroom escorts. We were not allowed to leave an exam to use the restroom without a same-sex restroom escort. Reason? There had been massive cheating by several foreign students accomplished by hiding textbooks in the bathroom.

[Taualumna]

Originally posted by DGMarie
without stating all of the obvious reasons why a female student might need to be excused to use the restroom, I am reminded in graduate school of a short lived policy of bathroom escorts. We were not allowed to leave an exam to use the restroom without a same-sex restroom escort. Reason? There had been massive cheating by several foreign students accomplished by hiding textbooks in the bathroom.

I don't think the guy was talking about exams here....anyway, when you gotta go, you gotta go...

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally posted by DGMarie
without stating all of the obvious reasons why a female student might need to be excused to use the restroom, I am reminded in graduate school of a short lived policy of bathroom escorts. We were not allowed to leave an exam to use the restroom without a same-sex restroom escort. Reason? There had been massive cheating by several foreign students accomplished by hiding textbooks in the bathroom.

I am glad that policy was short lived.

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally posted by Taualumna
when you gotta go, you gotta go...

Exactly. Go as quickly and quietly as possible.

[futuregreek]

I had to secure permission to use the restroom before tests in one of my classes. I asked at the beginning of the semester. Never had to go through with it though.

This man = sir whacks-a-lot

[non-greek newby]

I think he forgets that most college students are adults, not 3rd graders. I wonder if he would ever ask a speaker for permission to go the bathroom during a conference.

[abaici]

I did not realize this was an issue at the collegiate level. I expect students at the collegiate level to know how to take care of my personal needs before or after class. I feel people walking in and out of the class is a minor distraction. Besides, I don't want to miss the lecture.

Now, as for my little ones. They are not allowed to use the restroom during class.

[DGMarie]

Originally posted by abaici

Now, as for my little ones. They are not allowed to use the restroom during class.

How little is little?