My Fourth Graduate Class at Hopkins

My fourth class was my third attempt at Data Structures. Dr. Eleanor Chlan taught it. She was head of the department and also my student advisor. I figured everything would go well.

It was an online class. Mark, the division’s disability coordinator, and Dr. Chlan both assured me I’d receive classroom accommodations, namely captions. I remember wondering a bit about this; no one asked me in the run-up to the course what would work best for me.

The class started, and there Eleanor Chlan was on video, explaining data structures. Somehow, Hopkins had decided that doing a kind of video production for every week of the course was warranted.

What it felt like was that Dr. Chlan liked being on video, and that her deciding to make the videos was in itself a kind of performance, she was playing the part of the good professor creating videos for the disabled student. The thing is, nobody asked me. It felt like overkill. A slide deck with a captioned voiceover would have been cheaper and all the same to me.

What I would have said something about was their captioning system. It’s a single block of text below the video, with highlights jumping from sentence to sentence. It’s very distracting to read — I can’t imagine anyone liking it, or finding it easy to use. It’s not intuitive, and nothing like the captions used in movies, which people are used to.

I believe I mentioned this. Either Dr. Chlan or Mark told me the highlighing made it easier for people to read. Which people, I wondered. Not me. I’d really like to know if Blackboard consulted with any people who use captions regularly when inventing their captioning system.

No matter — I appeared to have what I needed.

Dr. Chlan also did weekly live office hours. These were not captioned. I tried to follow along, but it was hard. The few times I did, I asked Dr. Chlan to stop and repeat things a few times because I did not understand. (Didn’t understand the words — not necessarily the concepts.) She wasn’t particularly sympathetic. I even texted her that I didn’t hear very well, could she repeat. Her reply was that I should just do the reading.

I’m not very good at data structures. There’s something about them that my mind doesn’t wrap around easily. I struggled. I admit it. I also worked hard.

One of our major assignments was to use a data structure called a stack to model how an elevator works, with people getting off and on. I believe it was 25% of our grade. The problem was that the instructions didn’t say exactly how the elevator was supposed to work. For instance, if I pressed 4, and someone else pressed 2, would the elevator stop at 2 first, or at 4?

Dr. Chlan explained how the elevator worked in an office hour. I wasn’t there. I’d stopped attending because I found them hard to follow — just a voice, no audio, no captions. And Dr. Chlan speaks in a monotone, few emotional or tonal cues, which makes her hard for me to understand.

I emailed her several times asking how the elevator worked. She wouldn’t answer. She simply referred me to the office hour. But I couldn’t understand the office hour.

Remember that it was part of my disability accommodations that I receive all information we were going to be graded on in writing? Well, Dr. Chlan seemed to think that didn’t apply.

It was difficult to understand how a woman would spend hours — and probably thousands of her department’s money creating captioned videos starring her in order to fulfill my disability accommodations, but refuse to answer a simply question via email in order to do the same.

I muddled through the assignment as best I could, but could never get it working — it would have helped to have had instructions on how the elevator was supposed to work.

I bombed the assignment, looked at the numbers, and realized there wasn’t much chance of making a passing grade in the class.

I remember my last email from Dr. Chlan on the subject — it seemed sort of chortling. That sometimes the code just doesn’t come together.

I dropped the class. And I didn’t complain. She was my student advisor and the head of the department. Complaining that I had to drop because the head of my department hadn’t fulfilled my disability accommodations — after she’d spent probably about 20 hours recording videos in order to fulfill them — seemed a bad move.

I believe a lot of these issues could have been solved if she and Mark had asked me what I needed at the beginning of the semester. I could have saved them money, and they could have gotten me what I needed.

Here is what I suspect happened. Chlan wanted to prove that she was doing a good job of providing disability accommodations — so she went all out. The videos themselves made me believe she liked being onscreen. Academia attracts egos. Chlan has always felt a bit egotistical to me. And being the ‘compassionate’ professor who is good to her disabled student might suit someone who has a large ego.

But actually asking me what I need — what might work for me — never came into the picture. Heck, I never came into the picture. I believe I was an opportunity for her to perform and get some kudos for her performance. (Two performances, onscreen, and as the compassionate teacher — kinda ‘miracle-worker-lite.’)

Actually checking in to see if I was getting what I needed was never part of the plan. It’s not part of Hopkins EP’s tradition, and my limited experience with other offices at Hopkins (Office of Institutional Equity, the Provost’s office, and Student Disability Services) suggests it’s not part of the traditions at Johns Hopkins University in general.