Student vs. Student

Students travel in packs, cilques form, teams develop... it is the natural development of a class culture as the semester progresses.

It is interesting to watch the different personalities of students develop and how the culture of the class handles them. One of the more interesting characters is the "parasite" student. This tends to be the "weak puppy" that has a pleasant enough personality to integrate with some of the better students. In some classes the parasite can find a host to help pull them through the semester. In other classes, the environment quickly abandons the parasite... leaving it to suffer on its own. In the most cruel environments, the host starts to feed bad information to the parasite... perhaps a form of poisoning to protect itself.

The other interesting battle that can occur is the "Non-traditional" vs. the "Traditional" students. Some classes will have a combination of typical college age students and non-traditional (a.k.a., older) students that work full time in a professional capacity in addition to taking classes. The conflict can escalate as assignments begin to accumulate. The traditional students view the non-traditionals as people that are only taking one class and have experience as a benefit to help them succeed. The non-traditionals see the traditional students as a bunch of kids that have all the time in the world to complete their assignments.

In a good class the culture brings these two together to provide some of the life experiences with the fresh young ideas...