October 18, 2005

Tantalizing Tuesdays

We got to look at examples of different terrorist attacks from around the world in class today... it was really interesting stuff! I kept looking at the clock though, not because I wanted it to be over but because I wanted to know how much more I was going to get to see. I realized though, he probably thought I was bored...and it reminded me of a story back when I was teaching...

I told my students up front, point blank... (1) I would not take attendance, (2) anyone who would rather be somewhere else, is welcome to be somewhere else, (3) I only wanted people in the room that genuinely wanted to learn something.

The guy in the back though... perhaps he was hard of hearing...

One day he was fidgety and sort of noisy. He kept distracting me from my lesson and from the explanations individual students were asking for. Finally I noticed he was trying to find a clock - he was getting frustrated because the classroom didn't have one.

Unfortunately for him, I was having a bad morning...

I paused for a moment, looked down at my watch, looked straight at him, and said... 'There's no clock in here, but it's 10:20...which means I've got 30 more minutes to go, unless you have somewhere else to be...'

He squirmed a bit and turned sort of red, but remained silent.

Remember I said bad morning? It was a particularly bad morning...

I followed his silence with, 'No? Ok, good’ and went back to teaching my lesson.

I think it was a pretty good day after that...

Posted by Princess Cat at October 18, 2005 10:54 PM @ 10:54 PM in Grad School // Permalink | TrackBack
Comments

The REALLY sad thing is that "time boy" can pick himself up a fuctioning digital watch from any dollar store.

No excuse for not knowing the time :-)

Meanwhile, you have my sympathy for having to put up with people who appear to resent attending classes that they've actually paid money for the privilege of being in.

Posted by: Harvey at October 20, 2005 05:12 PM

Education is the only commodity where the customers (students) want to get shortchanged. When I was teaching for IBM the very first question asked on the first day of class was what time does class end on the last day.

Posted by: Denny at October 31, 2005 07:20 PM