Xepidemic

my history professor, lets call him Mr. C, is one animated guy both vocally and in appearance. Mr. C thinks that he is a game show host and even calls himself that. everytime we leave class he tell us to not to drink and drive much like bob barker. he is a silly guy who hops and jumps around when he talks and waves his hands sporadically. personally i think he just has to much coffee.

well today the class subject was about europe and the exploration of the new world. he breifly talked about the vikings and how they had metal weapons. he said something about how the vikings would go to foreign lands and see how their technology were superior and that the local inhabitants only had rocks for weapons. he then said a rock can be a preety effective weapon and then proceeds to make noises of metal swords flailing while throwing his arm up in the air. ka-tiing! ka-tiiiiing! ka-ting ting! By now Im looking at him in astonishment. Then he makes the funniest sound, KOOOOONK!! I had to look away and hold my mouth trying to hold in my laughter. I always laugh at these things. Funny noises. It makes me think of their face and I cant help but laugh. I almost died once laughing at a friend who said a guys name funny intentionally.

Now Im holding in my laughter thinking to myself I cant have this guy as my professor. I thought of how he would make another funny noise and I would burst into laughter and everyone would stare at me. I thought of maybe talking to Mr. C but what would I say? I mean its fun and all and makes the class interesting but I think it messes with my focus. Help me out guys. Have you ever been in one of these situations?

maleficent

and the harder you try not to laugh the worse it's gonna get.

Dr. S, professor of Greek Mythology, why a math major had to take such classes, was beyond me.. Dr S was a jingler. He'd come into class and start spewing, his left hand in his pocket, jingling his change, all thru the class, non stop, constantly, every day, and by the end of class, he'd look pretty spent (no pun intended)

Speculation was that he was jingling change as a cover to what he was really doing, and that there was a hole in his pocket and he'd make himself "happy" during class.

I'm not sure I've ever recovered from the giggles that I will get when I hear someone jingling their change -- because I'm pretty certain I know what they're doing.

Just go with it... laugh if you must... volunteer to be his dueling partner...

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Rodney

He's actually asking you to laugh at him, so go ahead. Besides, maybe if you laugh, he'll back off.

His take on the Vikings sounds fairly bogus. They fought plenty of people with advanced weapons. They invaded France periodically for a couple of hundred years until the French kings bought them off by giving them the peninsula of Normandy to settle in. (Yep, the Norman invaders who conquered England in 1066 were actually descendents of Vikings).

http://www.luth.se/luth/present/swed...king_age1.html

absorbentishe

Reminds me of a Prof. I had once. We all laughed at his antics. I got an A, so I had to take other classes by him, and same results. Maybe it's just his way of breaking the mold, and having fun in class.

ARTelevision

Histrionics is often a mark of faulty pedagogy.

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warrrreagl

Although it is true that a poor teacher can easily hide behind histrionics, I wouldn't consider it the tell-tale mark of the beast. It can just as easily be the trademark of someone who simply loves to teach.

Teachers of the 21st Century must be able to adapt to the remote control generation ("You have 5 seconds to gain my attention or else...") and find ways to break through to people who are accustomed to receiving information passively.

I think you would be insulting him if you didn't laugh.

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Averett

pedagogy:

1. The art or profession of teaching.
2. Preparatory training or instruction.

Okay, with the help of Dictionary.com I can finally understand what the hell Art is talking about

I always loved the teachers in High School who tried to be "cool"

Especially the math teacher who was rumored to be a bit too close to the cheerleading squad... Ahh high school. How I don't miss it.

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ratbastid

He sounds like fun. Go ahead and laugh--it's what he wants, anyway.

I had a math teacher in high school who was a cut-up like that. You'd be sitting there taking a test, and glance up to see he has pencils up his nose. Things like that.

Xepidemic

well everyone else in class was quiet, or serious, or maybe just a little sleepy. thats why i didnt want to laugh because it would have been one of those gasping for air, rocking back and forth, banging the table, looking like a fool laugh. im telling you, funny noises really get to me. i was trying my best not to laugh. it was so unexpected that he would suddenly go KOOONK!! so loudly. The KOOONK sound was his sound for someone getting hit by a rock btw.

Thinking about it, I guess I will stay in his class. It is fun and interesting and I wont be so caught of guard next time because now I know how silly this guy can really get.

Lasereth

I've had a few professors like that too. I usually just laugh my ass off during class if they do something funny. One of my archaeology teachers was a Paleoscatologist. Yes, it's what you think it is. About half-way through the year, someone asked why he became a Paleoscatologist...he blurted out, "Well, let's just say that I really know my shit." I laughed hysterically for a couple of minutes. Like three other people laughed. The teacher really got a kick out of it and I ended up making a good grade.

I always laugh at the teachers and especially their jokes...they like the students that appreciate weird senses of humor.

-Lasereth

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RainbowBright

At least he actually is funny. As a freshman in college when I was much younger and much less mature I was in a chemistry course when the prof started talking about Molecules "cleaving" I almost started laughing outloud at the reference to cleavage but fortunetly realized I was the only one laughing before I got too far. (It was mostly sophomore and juniors I think.)

Shpoop

just today, in my spanish class, my teacher started talking to me in a funny accent, sort of mocking me. I started crying i was laughing so hard...i have no idea why it was funny, but to me it was, and why the fuck would i pass up the opportunity to have a good laugh? And if its not an obnoxious, ear piercing laugh, it will probably get others to laugh too...it did in this case

So laugh your heart out...its the medicine for the soul

glasscutter43

In thirty years, he will be the prof you will remember.

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basmoq

Ahhh, I remember a prof like that, he was the funniest professor, but I'll tell you, I learned more in his bio class than I learned in any other class that year

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fhqwhgads

I had an Astronomy teacher in college who would wear a different funny t-shirt each day of class. The one I remember most had a prescription for Capt. Kirk for penicillin, and it was signed by Dr. McCoy. In the area where it said "notes", Bones had written "Stay away from green women".

I swear this guy must have had a log to keep track of what shirts he wore, because he never wore the same one twice. When he stood in front of the class and used tennis balls to show us the rotations of binary stars, he said loudly, "This is the part where I play with my balls in front of a large group of people." He was goofy as hell, but it helped some of us pay attention.

ForgottenKnight

Sounds like a good professor! Those are the types of professors you love to have teaching your class! They keep you entertained, and in doing so, you actually learn something that you would miss in a normal lecture. Normal lectures are boring in comparison. All professors should be that energetic and entertaining... Society would be much better off as more people will remember more of the material they learned, or would have at least had some stress relief by having had fun with a good laugh...

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theusername

The truth is the best teacher I ever had for a Government class sounds a lot like this guy. He'd impersonate political figures, and he was damn good at it. He would have the class laughing hysterically at mostly boring topics, well they were interesting to me but boring to most. He made Plessy vs. Ferguson interesting for two weeks. Now that is very hard to do. He knew simply everything there is to know about politics and law. Needless to say I learned more from his class then any other.

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powerclown

Your professor might be intentionally taking his subject matter, which to 18-21 year olds might seem more than a little bland, and injecting some needed energy and creativity into his teaching style. You should get a recorder and record his lectures, both for instructional reference and something funny to look back on.

ARTelevision

As Rodney indicated - his teaching is flawed.

I'm surprised so many folks want entertainment rather than sound educaton. The most popular teachers are not typically the best ones.

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roachboy

i know folk who dress up as various characters when they teach--i do not really understand the motivation myself, and would never do it.
but there are folk who think large hats help get points across.

and there is a sense in which, for better or worse, university is a form of entertainment. the assumption is institutionalized, to an extent, in that budget allocations are made on the number of majors/brand-loyal consumers, a criterion that pushes departments to engage as many students as possible on the widest possible range of grounds. entertainment is one of them. i guess.

it can also be so for students, who are often in university at 18 operating under the absurd assumption that they are figuring out what they want to do with their lives and are acquiring the tools to carry out this plan. most i encounter have no idea what they want to do and are only just figuring out possibilities while being in school. this puts you in a funny place--drifting a bit thorugh classes while under pressure to decide something from parents--lots of anxiety when the situation gets confronted head on--given that, students seem to enjoy being entertained and do not see in that any trade off. it becomes an end in itself. which is of course the whole logic of reality-as-entertainment in a nutshell.


this is a history prof---so for me this cuts a bit close to home....there are folk who understand the goal of history to be telling a nice story. this usually links to a disciplinary politics that sees history as a kind of vast continuum the function of which is to reassure little bourgeois students (and themselves, too often) about the solidity of the present by making a nice narrative of the past in which actors are reduced to characters and sequences of events to chain reactions---one thing follows on another....nothing to be done.....everything works out according to a Big Design...so watch tv....you might as well....its not like you trade away any political agency by reverting to entertainment......

if you look the past as something which (like the present) human beings have made and as a space open to contingency, then it (history) can work to corrode certainty about the present. this way of working pushes students to think about what the other approach takes for granted. if you work from anything like this latter perspective, you would probably not be inclined to dress up and act out swordfights.

needless to say, people who work from each of these general positions do not generally get along so well as professional actors--people from the first see the second as challenging their professional identities, while people from the latter tend to see the others as reactionaries.

so to the question of whether it is ok to laugh in such a situation: sure, you are expected to, it is part of the game.
you are powerless.
ha ha ha.
you might as well enjoy it.
ha ha ha.

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it make you sick.

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Lasereth

I agree that usually the popular teachers are the ones that let the students be slackasses, but wanting your teacher to be somewhat entertaining doesn't mean students would rather have entertainment than education. I'd rather have someone who really knows what they're talking about and has the ability to make the class interesting. I guess it's easy to get entertainment and interest mixed up...by entertaining I mean not completely and utterly dull. Most of the teachers I've had have been mindless drones who spit out information for the students to memorize. The best teachers I've had (I gauge that by what I've learned and remembered from the class) have been the ones that are interesting and even entertaining. I've yet to have an entertaining teacher who had a flawed teaching style...it seems to be the other way around at my school.

-Lasereth

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ARTelevision

Yep. It's important tp draw these distinctions. I didn't think they were being drawn clearly here until roachboy's illuminating post and your very-well wrought contrib. Thanks, Lasereth.

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warrrreagl

eeeeeeeeee

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