Students should deal gracefully with bad professors
The gnawing feeling of anxiety is prodding at your insides. Your shoulders are tense; you grip your pencil so tightly it leaves trenches where it pressed into your fingers.
You hate this professor. You skip class and leave angry when you actually do go. When they talk, you roll your eyes but keep your head down, so they don’t notice you. Instead of preparing for class, you just dread going.
This is the effect that professors can have on their students. The morale of a student and a classroom is completely dictated by the attitude of one individual, standing at the front gripping a piece of chalk.
This can be an amazing opportunity. Many professors slave away through years of schooling and training to enlighten young minds about something they are passionate about.
They consider the composition of their course: is the book useful? Does this project work? Does this assignment help them better understand the material?
This can also be a dangerous amount of power for the self-righteous and pretentious of the world. It’s easy for students to tell when a teacher wants the students to learn or if the teacher wants to show how much they personally know about a subject, after a lifetime of study.
While this can be irritating and downright pathetic to watch from a desk, it also affects the morale, and thus, the education of the students.
We’ve all had professors we didn’t click with, or classes that we hated, but I sense this constant theme in all those irritating classes: the professor had a bad attitude.
Whether they had failed the practical aspect of their field and gone into teaching, keeping their resentment in their suitcase or if they were a TA who thought they were too cool or a veteran of the trade who delighted in the power trip of their position, they were not there to help.
I fear that this issue does not have a solution. There will be classes and teachers you don’t like and part of growing up is learning how to deal with people and things that you don’t care for.
But refuse to let that truth stand in the way of another truth: sometimes it is the professor’s fault too. A degree does not make a person perpetually right. Tenure does not negate deep-seated flaws.