A professor at Australia’s Deakin University isn’t having the greatest time with students in the first class of the semester. Specifically, no students turned out for his class on estate planning.
Sharing his pain and disappointment on LinkedIn, Associate Professor Adrian Raftery took a photo of his empty classroom and a write-up of his complaints against millennial students uninterested in what he considers to be an important subject that would actually help them get jobs once they graduate.
Presumably, students had indeed enrolled into his class — but none of them bothered to turn up to learn the subject on the first day.
“I don’t know about you but my generation always showed up for lectures and seminars, particularly at the start of a semester,” wrote the irate professor.
“Here is my first class for 2nd semester which was supposed to have started 15 mins ago,” [sic] he continued. “After being pumped up to give a great class, I am deflated that they couldn’t bother their arse to show up.”
He explained further that the class he was teaching was on estate planning, which he described as a “mixture of law, superannuation, tax and financial planning.” He stated that it would be “one of the hardest they will encounter in their whole course.”
“Students don’t realize that their lecturers could be their best advocates for getting a job,” he continued. “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
Raftery told Mashable, which first caught wind of the news, that it was the first time in his six year career as a professor that he ever encountered an empty classroom.
He told the publication that the incident caused him to reflect on whether teachers were to blame for poor student engagement — and if there was any way to improve the experience to make sure they show up.