Haltom's Twelfth Law: No matter how well you teach a class-session, students would have preferred you to cancel.

Most students have better things to do than to listen to professors. If they do not, they are losers.

Professor, be not proud. Generous evaluations, awards from student organizations, and plaudits from the Faculty Advancement Committee cannot gainsay a simple fact. On almost any day of the semester, almost every student in your section had a place she or he would rather have been. Haltom's 12th Law does not maintain that lectures are pointless or that taking pride in presentations is counterproductive. Instead, Haltom's 12th Law suggests that professors adopt more realistic attitudes about how entertaining and how informative they actually are on any given class-day.

Were you showing a boffo movie? Students would have preferred to have watched the film over refreshments at some reasonable hour. They likely would have gotten more out of the watching as well. Spin the DVD and do your best not to talk over the soundtrack like a demented disk jockey, but realize that you are saving yourself a lecture and entertaining the internees and that "mixing it up" is tacit admission that normal classroom activities are tedious.

Are you about to loose your most riveting presentation? Save it into PowerPoint and let students process the slides at their own pace in their own quarters -- if you dare to be bested by a pillow.

Do you protest that students love your classes and would not miss them? Then admit that you are an entertainer who has found ways to overcome students' alternative activities by pedagogical arts, crafts, devices, and dodges. That is, your refutation of Haltom's Twelfth Law reinforces the truth of Haltom's Twelfth Law.

No matter what protests brash blowhards belch, no matter what platitudes self-promoters chant, and no matter what self-aggrandizement full pustules ooze, some class-sessions represent substantial opportunity costs for every student with a life and a mind. Any student who could not have found multiple activities superior to those in a classroom deserves pity instead of a bump for class-participation.

Colleagues note and grade attendance because they must wield sanctions to fill their sections. Haltom's 12th Law helps peers admit what they are doing. In 1999, for an example, one of my advisees was graded down from the B- he had earned to a D because he had missed too many meetings of a course. I asked the professor about the matter. She or he replied that the penalty was listed in the syllabus. "When students miss class, they do not do well on examinations and do not learn!" He or she had no apt answer when I responded to this pious pronouncement with logic: "Then shouldn't a grade based on examinations and other course responsibilities represent any such gaps in learning?" I was not surprised that the instructor had no back-up bullshit. I was happy to help her or him see that he or she was affronted that some student could do average work without her or his assistance. He or she seemed less happy to receive my help.

In sum, deductions for missing classes often become more severe the more that instructors, in their few moments of reflection, realize that absences do not reflect in performance, learning, or grades. Such is not to say that students should not be encouraged to attend, that students who are blowing off class too often should not be rounded up, or that providing rewards and penalties for attendance or deportment is atavistic. Again, Haltom's Twelfth is about attitudes rather than actions.

Indeed, Haltom's Twelfth Law articulates with Haltom's Ninth Law. See what you are doing [XII], then do what you are doing [IX]. Get out of the habit of denying what you are doing, for that habit will induce you to lose sight of what is before your nose in your own classroom. Lose too much sight and you'll blindly join the "Wigger Patwol." Among the Wigger Patwol, thumbscrews and waterboarding demonstrate anew how eager your students are to be in class this morning.

I know that "the few, the proud, the professoriate" will never acknowledge that, at least for some students, weathering lectures, deciphering scrawl, and "engaging" in gabfests that raise students' evaluations more than students' acumen are often related more to pumping up the performer than to learning or to grades. They'd rather coerce captive audiences before whom they perform shtick that will secure evaluations that will get the performers raises and praises and the hapless audience an hour closer to their deaths [with or without learning].

Such colleagues are correct to suppose that coercion serves professors far better than voluntary consent ever would. One need not have done much peer evaluation to see why so many colleagues will not leave attendance up to students' assessments of relative rewards.

However, if you suspect that colleagues sanction attendance because they despair of defeating video games, slumber, and good books [as opposed to required readings] by any other means, you are a cynic, "[a] blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are ..." [Ambrose Bierce] rather than as your peers' rationalizations require.

When cynics are correct, they imperil mindless conformity even more than when they are wrong.

Coming next -- Haltom's Thirteen Law: Only lowlifes espouse Übermenschen.