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In no particular order:

If you are in an audience, always sit in the front. The speaker likes that and appreciates it.

As a corollary, don't sit in the very far back. It makes a statement. When students do this to me, I have to chase them down in a way as I talk. I feel as though I'm trying to pin them like butterflies.

Again, in the audience, smile if you can. The speaker LOVES that. It's encouraging.

You can always be surprised. You may grow to have certain expectations from a student and that student may blow you out of the water the next time you look.

Students have incredibly adverse circumstances to deal with. Many have lost relatives and friends to car accidents. It's shocking to me. Of course I knew that there were traffic fatalities, but I didn't realize how many.

There's a smile somewhere inside the most hardened slacker.

Students are conservative in their way. They want you to enforce the rules. They expect it. If you get a group of chitchatters, you must deal with them. If you get a rowdy or disrespectful student (I have not had many), you must do something. Don't ignore the situation. I once had an energetic young man who would leap to his feet frequently to call out comments. He was genuinely excited and so I couldn't complain on that score. But he was incredibly annoying to everyone else and the atmosphere in class started to get nasty. It was during my first semester of teaching, seven years ago.

I tried telling him to raise his hand. That didn't work. I tried approaching the ringleader of the ones who hated him and that worked for about a day. Eventually, I had to give a speech about tolerance and I forget how long that lasted. I prayed for the end of the semester and it finally came.




Computers in the classroom suck. Seriously. If you allow them, guaranteed the students are IMing with their friends, playing solitaire, or even video games. The telltale sign is when they don't look at you. I don't allow them. Sue me.



Lots of young people are overweight.

All young people are attached to cell phones at the umbilical site.

It is surprising what they don't know. I have seen college students who didn't know, or didn't exactly know, what D Day was, what happened at Hiroshima, who the lieutenant governor was, and a million other things. I once asked students if they thought there was any stigma any more about having a so-called "illegitimate" child, and everyone sat silently for the longest time. I knew some of them actually had children out of wedlock and so I persevered, only to find out that no one in the class knew what "stigma" meant.

They do warm your heart, though. I promise you that.

Off to work on the old lady book.






A bientot

love,
becky

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