I teach at an “island university” in South Texas. The climate is warm, hot usually, and humid. It’s not uncommon to see students wearing shorts and flip-flops year round. Men wear tank tops and and women wear halter tops, and no one bats an eye. The dress style here is casual, and this type of casual attire might not be appropriate at other institutions across the country, those with a cooler climate or with a more conservative culture. Even though students here dress comfortably for the weather, even their “show of skin” can go too far. That’s the question in today’s post: What’s “too much skin” in a classroom setting when does too much skin become a problem?
This post continues the ProfHacker series on disruptive student behavior in the classroom. To date, we have had posts about students who engage in disruptive, off-topic behavior with each other, answer every single question anyone in the class asks, have a pungent aroma of illegal drugs or alcohol about them.
In this series, we present a scenario and offer a few suggestions from ProfHacker readers about how they handle similar situations. Today’s post breaks with this pattern. We will present the scenario and we’ll ask YOU what you’d do in the situation. Of course, the way you, dear reader, will handle these scenarios will depend upon your discipline, class size, your gender, students’ genders, and the culture of your institution. Lastly, the following scenarios are real. The institutions/professors are not named for soon-to-be obvious reasons.
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SCENARIO [male version]: Class is in session. Being the constructivist professor you are, you walk around the room as you lecture or guide your students in their tasks for that day. You notice a small group of students huddled over a computer trying to stifle their laughter. You approach the group to see what they are viewing on the screen, and it’s then you realize they are not laughing at something on the computer; they are using the screen as a shield to hide their laughter. You look up to see what they are laughing at, and it’s then you see the heavy-set young man at the front of the classroom leaning across a desk talking to another student. He has leaned so far forward that his pants (sans belt) have slipped …. they haven’t just slipped below his shorts (if he had been wearing shorts), but his low-rider jeans have slipped so far down his body he’s sharing his backside all with the rest of the class. The laughter escalates as other students catch on. He doesn’t seem to recognize that the students are laughing at him. You feel you have lost control of the situation.
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SCENARIO [female version]: Class is in session. You are standing at the front of the classroom lecturing. The door opens and a young woman enters. It’s hard not to notice her entrance: she’s wearing white thigh-high boots, a white miniskirt that could rival the length of her underwear, and a sheer white tube top (and she could get away with wearing these clothes in a different setting). You don’t want to stare at her, and nor do the other 35 male and female students in the room. But it’s hard to look away. You shake off the distraction and get on with your lecture. The other students, however, cannot (or choose not) to shake off the distraction of the woman in white. She seems oblivious to the commotion she’s caused. You feel you’ve lost control of the situation.
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Billie’s Response: As I was thinking about this post several weeks ago, I polled my students (50 students: 44 women and 6 men). I asked them (very informally), “If you were showing a disruptive amount of skin [enough that the class session came to a halt because people would be staring/laughing] would you want your professor to do / say something about it?”
Interestingly, the vast majority of the students said, “yes” they would want the professor to say something, but that “yes,” depended on the professor’s age and gender in relation to the student’s age and gender. Students felt that if a professor of the same gender as the student said something to the student (and said this privately), the male and female students would welcome the news, as they probably didn’t realize they were being disruptive or were embarrassing themselves. On the other hand, a female student, for example, would be embarrassed if a male professor addressed her clothing or her skin, especially if it was from a younger professor or one, according to students, who had the “creep” factor.
RESPONSE: Now it’s your turn. As the professor in the classes noted in scenarios #1 and #2, what would you do with students displaying “too much skin”? If you’ve had a related situation, how did you handle it? Please leave your comments in suggestions below.
[Image by Flickr user jessicafm, and used under the Creative Commons license. Note on the image: butts are really cute on babies.]
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8 Responses to Disruptive Student Behavior (too much skin edition)
tbf - April 5, 2010 at 4:18 pm
I am asking my Teaching Composition in 9-12 Grade education majors to write on this subject. I will (in real time, even) list responses that add any new perspectives to this issue:
“We’re all adults in college, so let us make our own decisions”
“Frosh need to experience freedom, because many have had to be in school uniforms in high school.”
“We pay a lot of money. It’s not like we show up naked.”
“As long as it’s legal, what’s the problem?”
“Where do you draw the line?”
“I’ve never been distracted like that.”
“Can you imagine what problems it would cause if you tried to enforce a dress code in college?”
“If you are at a public university, you should have more freedom than at a private religious college.”
“I wouldn’t be distracted.”
“How hard is that professor looking?”
“Respect should be given to your professor, but that involves cell phones…”
14 are against having any rules for clothing.
David - April 5, 2010 at 3:40 am
I’m baffled by Rana’s comment above. She says her father didn’t bring up the problem of too-short skirts b/c he didn’t want to be seen as the “pervy old man.” So his solution is avoidance…he’s not looking at the class, looking down at his notes all the time…in short, his whole teaching method is being totally disrupted.
Who is the intimidator in that situation? Whose behavior is creepy, and who’s the pervert?
I think that adult women (ie women 18 and over) should show their teachers, and more modest students, more respect–whether the college is near a beach, or not. If you want to wear short skirts to a club or party, fine. But the classroom is a professional environment, and one should dress accordingly. It just seems completely beyond reason for women to dress in a super-provocative fashion, and then get “creeped out” when, say, a 45-year-old man notices. Why shouldn’t he? And if he feels self-conscious, and if his teaching is disrupted, isn’t that reason enough in itself (regardless of whether the students like or dislike the attire) to ask for a change in students’ behavior? In fact, while I avoid using PC buzzwords, the idea that he should just ignore it, or get over it, or not be a perv, rests on a deeply ageist assumption–ie., that when one has gray in one’s hair, one is beyond the pale, and that one is somehow crossing a line when one notices a lot of skin showing.
I’d also like to remark that provocative clothing is hardly something worn by one or two deviant students who are bucking trends, etc. It’s a nationwide trend, the mainstreaming of porn, or the porning of the mainstream, as one Chronicle article put it. The students may think it’s all fun–Trix are for kids!–but from the point of view of an adult male teacher, I think they’re the ones who are being creepy.
My solution: I tell students there’s a dress code in the class, one that I can’t officially enforce with the administration’s help, but which they should follow for the sake of mutual respect. I remind them that not only their teacher, but other students are made uncomfortable when a woman shows too much skin, or when a guy shows his boxer shorts. If they get “creeped out” by their teacher even noticing the miniskirts or the boxers, then they shouldn’t wear that clothing to class in the first place.
Abby Knoblauch - April 3, 2010 at 12:25 am
Scenario 1 isn’t easy for me, nor is scenario 2. I had a female student who wore a skirt so short she couldn’t sit down in it, but she didn’t realize she couldn’t sit down in it until she tried. She stood. Yes, I’d talk to the snickering students, but I’d feel a need to talk to the student with the shorts hanging down. How? I have no idea, but if it were me, I’d want to know. The stretching idea is interesting, though.
Aeon Elpis - April 2, 2010 at 2:47 pm
One simple way to help with situation #1 — I’d ask all the students to stand up and stretch. Because I use this tactic when I see attention drifting, it would not be out of the ordinary and would not risk embarrassing the beltless student. It brings the students’ attention back to the class, and presumably it would give the student an opportunity to pull his pants up (and he might be more likely to notice once he stood up!).
I have had to talk with students who perpetually came to class in clothing that revealed much too much a few times. I make a point to do so outside of class, and I present it in relation to course content (I teach communication, so I can link to credibility, self-presentation, audience adaptation, and gender). This framing makes it a little less personal, but it gets my point across and gives me an opportunity to reinforce how what we do in class links up with their everyday lives — including their behavior and attire in the classroom.
Rana - April 2, 2010 at 3:40 am
I’ve never had these experiences myself (thankfully) but my father has related the uncomfortable experience of teaching students in a lecture hall with stacked seating and no leg shields on the desks, an arrangement that frequently put the crotches of female students in short skirts at an eye level in a way that made him feel quite self-conscious.
Not wanting to be seen as the pervy old man by mentioning it to them, his solution was to avoid the parts of the room where such students sat, and to spend a lot of time looking down at his notes or over their heads. Obviously, in this situation their dress was not disrupting other students’ learning (except in that their professor was distracted) but it’s hard to know how else he could have handled that, short of calling in a female colleague to pull them aside.
Jjw - April 2, 2010 at 11:56 am
I’ve avoided any of these problems — or anything in their ballpark — by teaching at 7:30am for the past few terms. It’s sweats, sweats, and more sweats. It’s rare to have a female student who has even bothered for more than a ponytail, let alone the work require for oogle-inducing attire. Yes, I have to get up early, but I’m also done with teaching and office hours before noon, leaving the whole afternoon for glorious productivity. Erm, with the potential for glorious productivity.
For situation #1, my solution would be to ask the students to all sit in chairs while they work in groups. That tends to cut groups down to 3-4 (which I see as a benefit) and eliminates the bending over problem.
tbf - April 1, 2010 at 11:54 pm
If students report that a peer is disrupting their learning, I’ll take action. Otherwise, I assume that everyone has been inside a locker room and has seen the human body before. Working at a university near the beach means that we get our fair share of short skirts and cleavage; also, boxers underneath shredded cut-offs are not unusual.
Students own the classroom space, even though they might not know it. By focusing on what matters–knowledge, skills, and beliefs–I hope to model tolerance towards those rare students who are experimenting with clothing and trying on different, sometimes odd, identities.
Stentor - April 2, 2010 at 7:11 am
Scenario #1 is easy. The snickering students get one public warning (assuming they haven’t been disruptive before), and then I ask them to leave class. Scenario #2 is trickier because it sounds like the students aren’t doing anything quite overt enough to be called out on it. I’d try to increase the Socratic component of the lecture or give them pair/small group work to do to force them to focus on the actual course content.
College students are adults. They should be expected to exercise self-control if they want to be in class.