Journal Entry #2

2/19/13
Journal Entry #2

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Every morning, I slowly wake up to the glory that is 9 AM French class. However, some of my classmates clearly do not know what time the class starts or what it means to be on time for a class that you have every single day. Something that really annoys me is personally being on time for class every day, and having to watch so many students stroll into the class anywhere from five to twenty minutes late. It is always the same people. It would not be nearly so annoyed if a student who is always on time randomly walked in super late one day. No, it is the people who have been in this same French class since last September, who for some reason, don’t believe it is worth their time to come into class by the start time, nor do they care about the professor’s opinion of them. I think one of the worst parts of the whole event is knowing that there will not be any direct consequences for them. I see the professor casually glance at the door each time it is opened in the middle of class. She will either smile at them, or even say the occasional “Bonjour” as they waltz past. Often she will interrupt her lesson to provide them with the stack of papers passed out to the rest of us at the beginning of class, and I realize “Wow, everyone just stopped everything so we could watch this person arrive.

There are many expectations flying around at this moment. One, the professor has an expectation that her students come to class. Pretty much every student fulfills this expectation each day. Another expectation comes from the students: “the professor will teach us a lesson in French for every day that we come to class”. This is another fulfilled expectation. However, there is also an expectation from the late students in class: “the professor will not care if I walk in late, I will still get marked present, and I will learn the lesson for today”. This expectation is unfortunately manifested. It then turns into an unfortunate cycle. Because the students expect the professor to be lenient for their tardiness, she is, and then after a few incidents of reoccurrence, the professor in turn, expects them to be late for class. Because the professor does nothing to create consequences for the late students, they continue to walk into class whenever they please.

This series of expectations is what people in the realm of psychology call the self-fulfilling prophecy. The self-fulfilling prophecy is a phenomenon I would venture to say is pretty well known outside of the psych world. Basically, it is the idea that your expectations of a person or thing leads to the person or thing fulfilling that expectation. This is generally due to one person’s attitudes to another person or people. The second person or group of people reacts to that first person’s attitude accordingly. So, from the example above, the student’s expectations about the professor are fulfilled by her complying with their tardiness. The professor (perhaps unconsciously) expects the students to walk in late, so they do, and everyone does what is predicted.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the professor spontaneously decided to be strict about punctuality. She could close the door exactly at the start of class and not let late students attend. However, in this case, I think some of the much later students may actually an excuse not to attend class, so this method would be inefficient. Another thing the professor could try would occur once the students have walked in. She could allow them to enter her class, but only give them handouts after the class had ended. During partner work, they could also be made to work with the professor instead of working with their peers. If these consequences happened every time a student walked in after the class had begun, it would probably decrease the frequency of their behavior because the expectations would have changed. This kind of expectation probably would have been more effective on behavior if it was initiated at the beginning of the year, but I digress.