Standing room only in a sold-out class

Test days are always crowded in lecture halls, as opposed to the lower attendance lesson days. Each student knows the class will be packed. But in some classrooms on Main Campus, there are not even enough seats for everyone.My physics classroom in Barton Hall has 202 seats built into it. There were 210 student slots offered and filled. Calculus isn’t needed to notice there are more students enrolled than there are seats.Two days before our first test, while comparing the student-to-seat ratio to the overbooking of airlines, the professor recommended we get to class early.This analogy is accurate, but I must argue that my education is a bit more important than arriving in Cancun 20 hours later than my original plan. At least airlines admit to their mistakes and try to repent with free air miles. Where is my offer for a semester’s free tuition in exchange for dropping the class? Or at least free text books? No, instead this plane has to jam us all inside.When it was the day of the test, I took the professor’s advice and got to class 15 minutes early. Of course, so did 100 other people. The testing conditions left many students unhappy.”It is unfair,” said sophomore Rachel Bech. “If you’re paying to go here, you should have a decent seat.”The seats thrown along the back of the room are way below decent. I sit in these seats in the back. The way back, where I can’t see a thing. Am I even in the class?Sitting there, I feel as if I’m not meant to be in the class. Sometimes I have to look at my schedule and assure myself I have paid to be in it.These seats help me realize the way my mother and sister felt at a bar mitzvah my family and I recently attended. The temple, due to tradition, had the women sit on the other side of a fence-like barrier, while the males sat freely in the middle of the room.Like the isolated territory in the temple, it is impossible to focus from the back row in class. The people who get to class a minute late forfeit the ability to see what is going on.This should not be the case. Temple needs to realize that not only should there be enough seats for every student, but there should be a surplus of seats. Filling up all 202 seats is crowded enough, but needing more seats to fit everyone is absurd.”How do you expect students to learn if they can’t be comfortable?” asked sophomore Will Gearinger.So if it is so necessary to overfill the classroom, investing in some sort of overhead monitor is something the administration should consider. Without it, from the back row, the notes the teacher is writing and demonstrations he is performing cannot be seen. Students in the back would be able to see what is going on in the front of the class on the display screen instead of standing up and squinting with little success.But as for now, my choices are either rush to class early, get squished in the middle or seclude myself in the back. Students should not be forced to make such a choice. Irrefutably, packed classrooms such as these infringe on students’ right to learn, while also putting us in an uncomfortable atmosphere.Jeff Appelblatt can be reached at the.jeff@temple.edu.