UConn junior and English major Timothy Stobierski adds his perspective on professorial behaviors in the classroom:

Dear Faculty,

Since I'm hoping you don't catch me as I nail this letter to your office door, allow me to take a moment to introduce myself. I am one of your disgruntled students.

Why disgruntled, you ask? Well, to put it simply, you do something that pisses me off. And make no mistake about what I mean by saying "you piss me off." I do not mean that you do something that "annoys me"; waiting in line at the library later to print out this letter when I'm done with it will annoy me. I do not mean that you do something that "tries my patience"; watching the interns...

One of the excellent students in my creative writing class, Michelle P. Carter, tells us more about what students would like their instructors to know:

1. We make lists of all your weird-ass mannerisms.

You start every sentence with "that said." You say "literally" when you mean "actually" or "I'm not exaggerating." You squeak "m'kay?" at every lull in your lecture, just to make sure that the crickets you hear and the tumbleweed you see blowing through this 300-seat hall is just your imagination. You stroke your chin whenever someone coughs. You're loud enough to wake the dead. You need to know that we make games out of these things. We count how many times you say "sort of" in 50 minutes (it was almost 200, by the way). We instigate a chorus of coughs to see if we can get you to rub that stubble off your chin. If we made a drinking...

I asked the brave and astute students in my upper-division nonfiction creative-writing class what they'd say if offered the chance to address the faculty. They responded with alacrity, sending in their work before the deadline and writing with a sense of authority derived from many years of classroom observation.

This is the first in the series. Written by Alana Wenick, it offers an excellent introduction to what is now known as "The 5 Things Assignment":

Professors: Some we love, some we hate, and all of them we need. But you can't tell a professor how you feel because they hold the keys to your future in their bony hands. I could, of course, try to offer up some constructive criticism, but I have a feeling that the conversation would go a lot like this: "Oh, so you don't think I put enough information on the slides, Alana? Can you say that a little louder? I...

In italics, placed at the end

Of the Indian Palace Royal Café

(Take-out available) menu's end,

Is the kicker,

("All Goat Entrees Served ‘Bone In'!").

Did the menu's writer 

Wish to speak heartily about goat

Or to demand respect

For its proper preparation?

Italics are at once modest and proud

Concerning their difference.

The swirl and curve of letters

Announce details which

For some restaurant patrons

(including

the husband from New Jersey

whose raw expression  at

the word "goat"

turns eating in

or out

into  self-sacrifice)

Will come as a surprise,

An inkblot test, for those

Unprepared for goat, for...

One of the great thing about being a college professor is that you don't envy the young.

While friends in other professions are waking up to their midlives (or what we choose to call midlife but how many people do you know who live past 100 -- not counting Lévi-Strauss?) and frantically wishing they could return to their twenties or thirties, those of us who have been dealing with undergraduate and graduate students don't want to time-travel back to those years.

Don't get me wrong: Sure, there are afternoons during my twentieth year I wouldn't mind revisiting on a regular basis (Tuesday afternoons in October, to be more precise). And yes, there are advantages simply assumed by some of my students (a wide range of...

All my friends are going to wonder what's wrong with me. I was supposed to be the smart kid and now I'm working as an adjunct and a freelancer and I'm not married and the part I really hate is that I'm not married and I wish it didn't bother me. I'm not sure why it bugs me as much as it does. Maybe because I thought the last guy was IT, you know? I thought we would get married. So when he said ‘I don't know whether we should renew the lease' I said ‘I know we've had a couple of rough patches recently, but I don't think that this means the whole thing is over, I just think that we need to work on stuff -- maybe even go to counseling.' But he said it just wasn't on his agenda.

So I left before he could leave. That was a joke, too, right? Because he drove me out. I mean, if a roach leaves your apartment after you fumigate, it doesn't mean the roach decided...

Teachers need Machiavelli.

Okay, teachers also need a couple of things Machiavelli lacks, such as a generosity of spirit, a sense of empathy, and a creative delight in the sheer magnificence of the universe, but that doesn't rule out my whole needing-Machiavelli theory.

Who, apart from those working with students, are a more perfect audience for the advice freely dispensed by this notorious author of the hard-hearted political masterpiece? True, most of us associate Machiavelli with ruthlessness, viciousness, and an unapologetic appetite for power most often associated with the Borgias, the Medicis, or those occupying the higher ranks of administration. 

Machiavelli is not an author you'd shelve next to most books written by those with an eye toward...

Maybe you think I've just been in the ladies' room all this time, but that's not the case. I haven't been blogging as frequently as I had in the past for a couple of reasons: I'm still not confident about or comfortable with the new software and format of "Brainstorm" and miss the more lively, if insane, exchanges with readers who made up names and, in all probability, entire personalities -- and I've had a complicated semester (both good and bad) this fall. But I'm knocking on wood and hoping that things will calm down and resume their routine.

Routine starts to look great when you've been away from it for a while. Ever...

The girl in gray by the bank of telephones,

shuffled from foot to foot, chilly although indoors.

Two darker girls waited for calls, smoking,

and a redhead wept because

she couldn't get continuous purring, what

the Brits then call a dial-tone.

Different phrases for the same thing.

Parallel lines, not too oblique.

Tears and mascara made her face a rag doll's,

sown together, seams showing. When she got through

then smiled, one tooth covered another in the

front of her grin.

The girl in gray was ringing her teacher about meeting.

For lunch. Innocent.

They were both in London. She was abroad. He was on leave.

"What are you doing today?" she asked him. "How about now?" he said.

I sort of don’t want to say anything until you watch this new "app."

Okay, now that you've watched it, you get what I mean, right?

You see, I thought it might just be impossible to: 1. degrade women further in popular culture; 2. make men seem more loutish and brutish than they already appear in popular culture.

But I was so...