Leergang

As a prof, you quickly learn to deal with half-filled classrooms. I can, of course, understand student absenteeism to a certain extent. I mean, did I faithfully attend all my university classes? (Ok, I did. But then I’m a nerd. But also a prof. So there …)

(And just to further support my nerdiness, I should explain the title of this post. Lehrgang is German for a course or a course of studies, whereas Leergang revolves around the concept of emptiness. (Interestingly, however, Leergang does mean a course of studies in Dutch, making them once again that little bit more down-to-earth than the Germans.) But, given that it’s Father’s Day today in Germany, a bad pun seems more than appropriate.)

In any case, the individual reasons contributing to the mass absenteeism are many, diverse, and not mutually exclusive:

1. the class is too early, too late, or to day;
2. it’s Tuesday;
3. either you or the material is too boring;
4. too many other (stupid) profs are scheduling their exams during the lecture period; and, when all else fails,
5. Deutsche Bahn.

To counteract this tendency and to help whip a little education into the students despite their worst intentions, we were able to designate certain types of courses as having compulsory attendance. This, of course, is patently retarded for any of number of additional reasons:

1. the mere fact of having to treat grown people as children,
2. only being able to do this for practicals and seminars when lectures are by far the more important (for the students) because that’s where all the profs draw all their exam questions from; and, not to forget,
3. the utter meaninglessness of it all because any attempt to check it is illegal.

That’s right. Because of the GDPR and data-privacy concerns, we’re can’t take attendance in our classes, even to the point of sending around a sign-up sheet or, presumably, making our own secret lists.

What makes this last reason so insidiously stupid is that the students all tend to know each others’ names anyway. (Or at least far better than I do.) More to the point, their names are all listed in the course-management software used by the University anyway, a list that every student has access to by default for each course they’re enrolled in.

Yet, somehow, having written documentation that a student attended a particular class on a particular day—something that those other students who attended the same class on the same day would already know—does more to violate their data privacy than having all the other students in the course know their course of studies and even which semester they are currently in, two pieces of information that are also readily available through that same course-management software?

Sounds more like a Spülgang (meaning, among other things, flushing of the toilet) to me …