Struggling to Stay Awake

Kate Smith was in dreamland when she felt something hit her. She woke up baffled to see everyone looking at her and laughing. The professor had thrown chalk at her to wake her up. "You shouldn't fall asleep in class," he said, laughing.

She had dozed off in Near Eastern studies professor Michael Doran's course on the United States and the Middle East. The class is relatively small — about 45 students, — she explained.

"It was the first time I was in a class and the professor noticed I was sleeping," she said. "He knows who I am, and he saw me."

Starting next semester at Yale University, students like Smith may not be able to slumber anonymously through larger classes. Professors there will have access to an online directory of digital photographs of students in their classes.

Though the initiative by Yale's Teaching and Learning Committee was not meant to allow professors to identify students to rebuke them for sleeping in class, it may have just that effect.

Smith explained she has never fallen asleep again in Doran's class since the chalk-throwing incident.

Doran joked that his lawyer advised him not to comment because the matter was tied up in litigation.

"Perhaps she is keeping the matter out of the courts because I lobbed the chalk; I didn't zing it," he said.

"My general reaction is to lob chalk at them," Doran explained in an e-mail.

One economics professor explained non-attendance was a more serious problem in his 300-level course than students who generally sleep for only a few minutes. The professor said he also teaches another, more advanced economics course where no one ever falls asleep. "I didn't choose the course, it was imposed on me," he explained.

"The subject material is not the most exciting topic, we follow a textbook fairly closely, and I publish the lecture notes I use," he said.

"They are old enough to drive a car, to vote and to be sent off to war, so certainly they are old enough to decide how much effort they need to put into paying attention to class lectures," he said in an e-mail. "I would think staying at home and sleeping in a bed would be much more comfortable than trying to sleep in a lecture hall, but that's up to them."

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Smith said she didn't mean to fall asleep in Doran's class.

"I'm definitely a night owl," she explained.

She sometimes does not go to bed until 3:30 or 4 a.m. because she works as a waitress off campus until 1 a.m. on some days. "The afternoon is the worst and I fall asleep right away in these classes."

The economics professor empathized with students like Smith who may be over-tired from busy schedules, "We've all been there. My Ph.D. is from an institution where a senior faculty member routinely slept through our weekly seminars."

"But if they sleep through the whole course and then fail the exams, they won't get a whole lot of sympathy when they come asking for special treatment."

To combat the problem of students sleeping in class, Doran said, "Classrooms should be equipped with more chalk and frisbees."

(Smith's name has been changed to protect her privacy.)