"In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!" -Ron Carlson
Fortunately this semester I have no teachers that I absolutely hate. (Or unfortunately, depending on your point of few since it makes for few and far between blog posts as I have no reliable ranting material.) But a couple of my teachers do have annoying habits. They are not alone in this. I always seem to get one or two teachers a semester that, though they're very nice, do certain things that drive me nuts. Two habits in particular that I can't stand, and that seem to be fairly common.
1. Not handing back tests right away. I'm not talking about taking 3 weeks to grade a test. I'm talking about the teacher having the graded tests in their hand, but talking at the class for 10, 15, or 20 minutes before passing them back. Different teachers talk about different things. Some want to give statistics about how the class did on the test. Others want to tell you about why they made the test a certain format. Some want to comfort you and tell you that if you didn't do well on this test, don't worry; the lowest test score is dropped and you still have 3 more chances! Still others get into lecture mode about how you need to take your education seriously, and studying for tests is important and yada yada yada. I wouldn't mind this talking so much if they'd just pass back the danged tests before they started jabbering. Because that leaves me sitting there sweating about how I did. See, I never think I do well on tests. Often I do, sometimes I don't, but I never finish a test thinking "man, I did really good! I know I got an 'A'!" Most of the time I'm thinking that I'll be lucky if I get a 'C'. And then the teacher gets up and talks for half an hour and I'm sitting there getting more and more worried by the second (especially if the teacher's in lecture mode) and thinking I did horribly. My psych teacher took the proverbial cake this semester by talking at us for 30 minutes and giving a complete statistical breakdown of how the class did. He had a transparency sheet completely filled with all kinds of statistics; not just highest and lowest scores and average, but all kinds of stuff that I didn't know what it meant. And he just. kept. talking. and talking. and talking. And I'm thinking, I don't care what percentage of the class answered 'b' on question 27!!! I just want to know what grade I got on the friggin' test!! Is that too much to ask?! Hand back the #*@&%*@ test already!!! I can't tell you how many teachers I've had that do this. And I don't know why. I can understand them wanting to try and get the class to take their tests more seriously if the class did poorly as a whole, or reminding students that the lowest test score gets dropped, so if they study hard from now on they can still get an A in the class. But why do all this talking before passing the tests back? It's cruel and unusual to me.
2. This second one annoys me to no end, and I just had this happen today again. When you have to write something in class, be it an essay, or just a few sentences, and, once again, the teacher won't. stop. talking. (BTW, the same teachers seem to be guilty of these two complaints.) They give you a writing assignment, but they keep talking. Usually about stuff that you should pay attention to. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't write while someone else is talking. Even if I'm trying not to listen, if someone in the room is talking, intending for everyone in the room to hear them, my brain refuses to put coherent sentences together. I can write with general background noise, but if there are distinct words, it doesn't just mess with my concentration, it demolishes it. Tonight, it turned what should have been a quick, simple writing assignment into an hour long struggle to type a few sentences. This quirk baffles me even more than the first one. What are teachers thinking when they do this? Do they forget from one second to the next that they just told the class to write about something? Do they think we have brains like desktop pc's, where we can designate one portion of our brain to one task, and another portion to another task and they won't interfere with each other? What is going through that teacher's head, I'd like to know! And it's not like it's a few last minute instructions, either. They just keep talking, sometimes about nothing. They tend to do this during group projects, too. My English teacher did this last week. We'd just split into groups to discuss certain chapters in the book we were supposed to have read, but there's no way you can discuss something with your fellow group members when the teacher keeps talking at the class endlessly. Once again, what was she thinking?
I am sticking to my conviction that teachers are an entirely different species. Not necessarily good or bad, just not human. It's the only explanation.
