Disrespect in the Classroom

Today, I saw something in a class that I hope I never see again.

My statistics class has a foreign born professor, who is young, organized, energetic, and clearly committed to teaching her students. Sure, her pronunciation of words is sometimes a touch unusual, but her intelligence shines throught whatever syntactical mists may ocassionally appear.

Stats is a fairly difficult subject, and some in our class really “get it” and some really “don’t get it”. The professor will meet with anyone, anytime, outside of class to help.

Today, while she was lecturing, one of the “don’t get its” decided that her use of material from the text for an example was something to ridicule, so he engaged in a mocking whisper campaign with another student……just loud enough for the entire class to hear. Laughs, smirks, and a few disrespectful words signalled his “perspective” on her effort to make a teaching point.

She heard him, of course, and when she completed her lecture she levelled a blast at the class for not being respectful. And then she broke down in tears.

I hope you’re pleased with yourself, big boy. Thanks for showing another foreign national that we American students are pigs.  Thanks for destroying the community of students in that classroom. Thanks for your part in damaging the psyche of a committed educator.

What an asshole.

1 Response to “Disrespect in the Classroom”


  1. 1 Dan November 15, 2007 at 4:16 pm

    This kind of thing is just infuriating. Big Boy ought to be glad you’re a gentleman and didn’t break him in two pathetic pieces.


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“Life’s hard, son. It’s harder when you’re stupid.” — The Duke.

Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate,no despotism can enslave. At home, a friend, abroad, an introduction, in solitude a solace and in society an ornament.It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage. - Joseph Addison
The term informavore (also spelled informivore) characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food. George A. Miller [1] coined the term in 1983 as an analogy to how organisms survive by consuming negative entropy (as suggested by Erwin Schrödinger [2]). Miller states, "Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy, so the mind survives by ingesting information. In a very general sense, all higher organisms are informavores." - Wikipedia

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