The atmosphere on the first day of a big lecture class, at least before the professor arrives, is something akin to a rock concert that’s going to immediately sour. Everyone has some semblance of a clue as to why they’re there, but no one has an idea of what this event — the performance of entertaining the attention of as many as 600 students — is really going to be like.
Now, there’s an inverse relationship between how quiet a room is and how nervous a group of relative strangers in it is, so lecture halls are fairly loud at this point — some of it is old friends catching up, other conversations are small talk, but most people are whining. Trepidation gives way to chatter, but chatter finally gives way to the professor's entrance.
And unlike a concert, few people are excited when the host arrives. The go-getters, the future yuppies, the kids on pre-wealth tracks are fervently taking notes and rolling their eyes at anyone asking a question; the kids taking this course to fill a general education requirement are shamelessly on their computers; if I was in this imagined lecture, I’d probably be daydreaming and missing — as if selectively — every important detail on the syllabus. But at the center of this mass student frenzy is someone who didn’t completely sign up for this.
I distinctly remember my third-grade teacher telling my class of 8-year-olds why she was so intent on us learning our multiplication tables. “I’m preparing you for fourth grade!” she said, almost in a panic. “How will it look if you can’t find what two times two equals?”
My fourth-grade teacher, in turn, believed it was her job to prepare us for fifth grade and the notoriously steely matron of that level of elementary education. I went to a small school with only one teacher per grade level, by the way. This argument continued at every level, even into high school.
The underlying message was not about how trained or knowledgeable we were as students, but how we performed, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The quality of the result of a task is generally reflective of the capabilities of the person performing that task, and we’ve built our education system around this idea. But somewhere between my eighth-grade history teacher saying, “Your high school teachers don’t care about your excuses,” and my 11th-grade English teacher saying, “You think your college professors care about you? You’re just a blip of data to them,” the implied message that emerged seemed to be, “The teacher after me will skin you alive. Mark my words.”
For the record, with few exceptions, I’ve been lucky to have only excellent teachers, even into college. If I can be a little honest, the scene from the beginning of the column is based on the experience of my first college lecture. My General Chemistry 1 professor sauntered in, rubbed his hands together and blew into his mic to get our attention. He said some important class-related things — again, I’m absent-minded — and then, to the astonishment of anyone taking a general chemistry class at UF, said, “I don’t care about what grade you end up getting. I care about what sort of person you end up becoming.”
General Chemistry 1 still happens to be the only A I’ve gotten in a science class at UF. I remember visiting his office hours once, asking him a few questions, then getting derailed on the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, the late Polish Nobel Laureate. That particular day, he wasn’t busy in his office hours. If a professor is busy, he’ll politely inform you. What I remember was how starved of student-teacher interaction he seemed, and then recognizing how lecturing wasn’t perfectly equivalent to teaching. At the time, I fully believed I was a data blip to him. I only went to his office hours once, though I wish I had gone to more.
Neel Bapatla is UF English sophomore English. His column appears on Thursdays.
