The students organized a walkout today, coincidentally right in the middle of my lecture. It was fine, as I was well-warned and the walking-out students left respectfully. (I gave them a preplanned lecture-pause in which to pack up their things and exit.) I didn't feel personally disrespected --- how could I? they're taking a political action having to do with the national election. If they had walked out because they didn't like the algorithm I was presenting, that would have been a different matter.
About half the class walked out.
One interesting after-effect of the walkout is that one of the non-walkout students posted complete lecture notes on the course messageboard. (Hooray for students helping each other to study and learn.) This is the first time I've seen the notes taken from one of my lectures, and I was amused to find out how much of my ongoing colorful aloud monologue made it into the notes, interspersed with and surrounding and annotating the mathematics that I wrote on the board.
This post's theme word is epanalepsis (n), "a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is repeated after intervening text. Example: "The king is dead, long live the king!"" The protest was very positive, with pleasant parlance and paucity of epanalepsis.
