No, I currently have no aspirations to stand up in front of 200 students and hear my own voice a whole hour straight.
Nor do I even possess the desire to impart my illogical perspectives upon impressionable minds.
Nevertheless, if I ever do find myself in such a situtation, here's an ongoing list of what I must remember from my days on the other end, as a student...
Students will love you if you return their graded exams (or assignments) by the next class. For each subsequent day that they're not returned, your popularity
will decrease proportionally.
If you crack a joke and nobody laughs, it wasn't funny.
However, if you crack a joke and they cringe or groan, it was a good joke.
This one courtesy of a certain BISC 431 TA...
No, they're not snoozing in class because they had a long night out. They're bored, doofus! (Otherwise, they would've stayed home and slept in!)
On a more positive note, several students cut class only because they majorly procrastinated and have to cram for a midterm in the next hour.
On a more negative note, most students cut class because you bore them! They have better things to do with their time and can get the notes off of somebody else,
or the web, or just read the darn textbook.
You can yell at a person in the front rows to wake up or put down that book they're reading for another class, but yell at the ones in the back rows to do the
same and they'll threaten to beat you up.
I've actually seen evidence of this...
Students don't sit in the very front row routinely because they think you're a wonderful lecturer. They're only there because otherwise they'd fall asleep in
the back row. OR because they're consistently late and have nowhere else to sit.
However, students in the front row might actually think you're kinda hot...
Seriously, one day when we had a young buff substitute lecturer in a kinesiology class, two girls who usually sit near the back suddenly grabbed
all their stuff and planted themselves directly in front of him in the first row (where nobody ever sat since, heck, this was a lecture hall with only about 30 students).
A little obvious perhaps...?
The people you give A's will love ya. The people you give B's or lower will think you're the meanest and toughest scum of the earth. It's a fact of life.
Deal with it.
You can give them all A's, but then you'll be fired. But everyone will love you.
You can give them all F's, but then you'll be fired. And everyone will hate you.
Students talk behind your back all the time. You can't win 'em all. That's another fact of life.
