There’s an ancient student proverb that goes “Hey I heard that if the professor/teacher is 15 minutes late for class then we can leave.” I’d never heard of anyone doing that in real life — I thought it was just an urban legend like the one about your roommate dying automatically giving you a 4.0 for the semester, or how some colleges are designed to make it easy for police to quell riots. Until a week ago I’d never thought that people actually went by it. I’d done it in high school — if one of my teachers didn’t show up we spent the entire class period playing Words With Friends.
I got to my 2:00 class a few minutes early. The clock in the CLA classroom struck 2 and our professor still hadn’t arrived. He was usually on time so everyone thought it was odd that he wasn’t there. As the minutes ticked by, people began pulling out their phones and checking their email incase our professor decided to cancel at the last minute, despite the fact that he messaged us the night before saying that class was gonna happen. At 2:10 a classmate mentioned that at 2:15 they were going leave, and everyone else agreed to do the same. Before leaving, we all signed a sign-in sheet proving that we showed up to class and then walked out the door.
While walking out of the classroom because our professor was a no-show (later that day I found out why he wasn’t there) I thought it was cool how we all just decided to leave because of an unofficial college rule.