We’re not sure what head-splitting wrestling moves have to do with effective communication skills, but one Sacramento community college professor saw fit to let two students illustrate the link during an interpersonal communication course that turned bloody at American River College.
As The American River Current reported today, a cellphone video of the impromptu wrestling match uploaded to YouTube got students around the College Oak Drive campus gabbing about professor Geoffrey Stockdale’s decision to let the scrum continue, even after one of the students cracked his head on the linoleum and started bleeding heavily enough for the entire class to groan.
“Yeah, I hit my head. It’s cool,” admits the injured students.
Then his classmates, their desks in a circle for optimum viewing, react to the deep cut dribbling plasma from the side of the student’s forehead.
“Hey, you’re leaking, bro. You’re leaking out your eye, bro,” one says.
The dazed-looking student contends he’s OK and tries to carry on with the tutorial, clapping the legs of his concerned opponent, who’s pretty much an unwilling participant at this point.
“Hey, he has a concussion right now. He doesn’t know,” a student says to uncertain titters.
The college’s dean of humanities, Kate Jaques, told SN&R officials were aware of the incident and “looking into this matter closely in order to ascertain all of the facts, as we do not want to rush to judgment.”
In the video, Stockdale—bald with a frosty white beard sprouting under his jaw—appears mostly unfazed in his front-row seat. (That’s him in yellow suspenders and a green button-up.) He does lean in on a crooked elbow at one point for a better look when the students tumble again to the floor. But mostly he just sits and watches, which cued an article by the campus newspaper.
“[One student] wanted to do a particular takedown,” Stockdale told the Current. “And so there was [one student] with his back on the floor and his legs up around [the other’s] waist, and somehow he did this takedown, and with no mat… of course this is the part that’s going to get me fired. Irresponsibility and allowing it to happen.”
Stockdale may have remained in his seat, but a bespectacled classmate got up to sponge up the blood with what looks like a napkin.
“What are we doing here?” another student wonders shortly before the video cuts out at 56 seconds.
Communicating. Duh.
