Model this

Students in George Parrott’s psychology courses have an unusual requirement: they must bring homemade snacks each week to the laboratory section, and they need to work out a schedule such that groups of students make sure each session is covered, and that snacks aren’t repeated from week to week. If there are no snacks, Parrott walks out of his class at California State University at Sacramento, and the students lose that week’s instruction.

Parrott has been teaching at the university since 1969. He says he started this requirement a few years after he arrived — and that most students have appreciated the ideas behind the rule (which he says are more educational than culinary). But on Thursday, when students in the morning section of Foundations of Behavioral Research didn’t bring muffins (or anything), he enforced his rule. He left class and took his teaching assistant to breakfast. One of the other sections missed its snack obligation one day last month, and he left that class, too. Ever since, the snack schedule has been followed by the students in that class.

I snickered at this sentence:

This is Parrott’s last semester before retirement, but his teaching technique — in use for more than 30 years — is now being subjected to scrutiny.

Here is more.