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[lolar2]

My husband and I used to have many students in common when we were TAs at the same university. Most of them acted the same in all classes, but some were much better in one than the other-- usually because of personal preference for one instructor over another, and/ or because of preferring one content area over another. Since my husband and I have different last names, it was always fun to see the faces of the students who acted very different from one another when it was halfway through the semester and they found out that we were married.

[concordancia]

I'm with Concordancia.  I do well with jerks-- my kind of people.  I often like the energy they bring to a class room.  For me, the trick is to involve the quiet ones.

I found a trick somewhere for evening out the discussion between the conversation butterflies and the wallflowers.  All students start the class with three cards that have question/comment written on them.  During the class, each time the student asks a question or makes a comment, they have to give you one of their cards.  Once they're out of cards, any questions/comments have to be addressed directly to you after class/during office hours.  If the butterflies run out of cards and the discussion begins to falter, you can call on one of the students who still has cards.  I haven't tried it, but it sounds like an interesting strategy to try.  It's supposed to also encourage students to really evaluate the importance and value of their question/comment before blurting it out, since they only get three.

I think it's fairly common because I was that kind of student (yeah, yeah, I know.  I'm somewhat better now.)

What would set me off would be a combination of content and demeanor.  Someone who doesn't gear the class at the level I wanted while going through things that I found either blindingly obvious or trivial detail irritates me beyond belief.  You required me to pay and attend this class because it's good for my general education.  What the hell am I getting out of this class?  Teach me something worth knowing already that I can't get from reading the book or somewhere outside of class!  If that instructor also appeared weak, then the juvenile behaviors would come out to try to influence the class the way I wanted it to go or at least render retaliation (if I'm not getting anything from this class and am irritated, the instructor better shape up or be equally irritated).

I have to admit that, like polly_mer, I could also be a problem student for professors who didn't meet my standards.  I was in the Honors program and felt that classes listed within such a program should be stimulating and challenging, not 1 1/2 hours of listening to some monotone old geezer read from his 20 year-old manuscript.  That was when I was a feisty undergraduate.  I calmed down in grad. school, but then again, all of the classes challenged me, so I didn't have a reason to revolt.

I asked harder questions of more boring professors. Basically, if they let me get bored, I would entertain myself by running circles around them.

[patchouli]

The rare students I have problems with are those with absolutely no sense of humor.  They are the intensely serious ones who border on the obsessive when it comes to grades or schedules, and they tend to be rather inflexible.  Some of these are fine if my colleagues' courses, but I really have to struggle to conceal my exasperation with them, and if I let my annoyance show, then they can become problems.  Give me the crazy slacker students over those who chase me down the hall objecting because I gave the class an extra day to do an assignment any day.

I'm getting better at handling them, though.  

These are also my nightmare students.  I also prefer the louder, more curious students over the tell-me-what-to-do-to-get-an A type who lack imagination.  

MG,  Your colleague might try getting the eye-roller into a group actitivy with other non-eye-rollers and see if that bring her back to reality.. . but I know there is a divide at our campus between these preferences of student types

[peppergal]

Lolar's story reminded me of a student I once had when I was a grad student.  Unbeknownst to him, he was also taking a class from my roommate, and a class from my boyfriend, all in the same semester.  All three of us knew that we had the same student.  The student was very good for my boyfriend, slightly problematic for me, and a nightmare for my roommate.  No idea why. 

One day he ran into me and boyfriend at a coffee shop.  Suddenly, once he knew that boyfriend and I knew each other, he stopped being problematic in my class, though he was still a nightmare in roommate's class.

My roommate finally called him on it -- he had claimed to be ill and missed her class, asking for an extension on a paper that was due, but he managed to make a miraculous recovery for my class two hours later, in which no paper was due that day.  Once he figured out that she and I knew each other, he became a model student in all three classes.

[grasshopper]

I think it's fairly common because I was that kind of student (yeah, yeah, I know.  I'm somewhat better now.)

What would set me off would be a combination of content and demeanor.  Someone who doesn't gear the class at the level I wanted while going through things that I found either blindingly obvious or trivial detail irritates me beyond belief.  You required me to pay and attend this class because it's good for my general education.  What the hell am I getting out of this class?  Teach me something worth knowing already that I can't get from reading the book or somewhere outside of class!  If that instructor also appeared weak, then the juvenile behaviors would come out to try to influence the class the way I wanted it to go or at least render retaliation (if I'm not getting anything from this class and am irritated, the instructor better shape up or be equally irritated).

I have to admit that, like polly_mer, I could also be a problem student for professors who didn't meet my standards.  I was in the Honors program and felt that classes listed within such a program should be stimulating and challenging, not 1 1/2 hours of listening to some monotone old geezer read from his 20 year-old manuscript.  That was when I was a feisty undergraduate.  I calmed down in grad. school, but then again, all of the classes challenged me, so I didn't have a reason to revolt.

I asked harder questions of more boring professors. Basically, if they let me get bored, I would entertain myself by running circles around them.

Heh.

The worst students are those who think they're being smart and running circles around their professors, but actually are just completely unaware of everything they don't know.

For example, these students probably don't know how many other students in the class need more repetition to get down the basics (which, having access to the course grades, the prof does know). Or the purpose of the material learned in the course, and how it will be useful in future courses (which, having helped design the curriculum, the prof does know). Or how this boring, predictable, basic section is necessary to do the fun stuff their brilliant little minds are so anxious to get to.

I'm thrilled with students who want to be challenged, and am more than willing to give them extra reading and work to supplement materials that may be beneath their level of ability. But students don't get to decide what is important and what isn't. We're the ones who make those calls. And there's a good reason why we don't give that responsibility to our students. Nor is it their right to undermine everyone else's education (who are also paying to be in that gen ed class, thank you very much) because they are such precious little geniuses.

If they're so smart, they should be smart enough to find something interesting or challenging in any subject.

I had one such little s*** last year. A fourth year student, with an ego four times the size what it should have been, taking an introductory humanities course. He was (predictably) bored silly with the course content, which he had picked up in bits and pieces over the four years he'd taken other courses in the discipline. Well, duh. What did he expect? It was a course designed for first year students, not someone in the last semester of a major in the subject. All term long, he insisted on being the smart-ass, "dancing circles around the prof." What an annoyance. He was a great asset in group and class discussions, because when he was talking to the other students, he challenged them to think beyond the readings and lectures - which is great! But during lectures, the questions he asked were well beyond the scope of both the course content and the other students' knowledge base. It was frustrating for them, and annoying for me to have to derail the lecture to explain the history of, say, poststructuralism.

The irony is that he didn't get a good grade in the course, because he didn't do most of the assignments I'd designed to teach students the steps to writing a research paper. As I heard him remark to another student, "I'm almost graduated. I don't do outlines." Yeah, no kidding. That much was apparent from reading your paper, Mr. Smarty Pants.

[polly_mer]

I want to agree with you, Grasshopper, but I can't.

I took too many classes that I really shouldn't have been in because I didn't know about testing out of the introductory sections and I was poorly advised.  It was, indeed, a waste of my time (knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know now) to take some of those classes.  With two years of high school chemistry, the first new material showed up after two semesters of general college chemistry.  I love chemistry and did all the work so I aced those two semesters of general chemistry, but it was still a year that I could have spent taking higher level chemistry classes earlier.  I should not have been in Comp 101 and 102 because those were set up to help people learn to write coherent sentences so I passed with flying colors by doing all the work, because the instructors focused on helping the people who were struggling with elementary school-level tasks instead of hammering me on things like logical structure, strong support of statements by evidence, and other finer points of writing.  Thus, I did a bunch of work that was of minimal use to me when I could have been doing harder work that would have helped me later instead of having to take it on the chin as a senior when some engineering professor started hammering on me about my writing because "You can do better and this class is small enough that I can hammer on everyone's weakest points.  You're good on the engineering part so I'm going to hammer on your writing".  I should not have been in two semesters of general physics because there was nothing new there until the last unit.  Again, I passed with flying colors because I did all the work since I love physics, but I should have been taking other classes in physics, not the general ones.

It does no one any favors to stick people in classes that are too introductory for their general education and insist that any smart person can figure out a way to make the material interesting.  How interested are you in reading "Oh, look Jane.  A ball.  Look, look.  A ball"?  You're not and the ways to make it interesting are not conducive to your education whereas putting you in the appropriate section of physics (studying the motion of the ball), literature (we can have much better stories about balls), or feminist studies (why is Jane the one looking at the ball?) benefits everyone.  I spent far too much time in K-12 having to do extra work because of a lack of other classes available at the right level to either want to do that as a student or want to do that to my students who really are in the wrong section.

I'm perfectly willing to play with the students who merely think the work is beneath them with no demonstrated evidence, but students who can demonstrate that the work is beneath them (and indeed that all the work in the class is beneath them even once we get past the boring introductory bits) should get some sort of special accommodation, especially if that evidence comes early enough in the semester to get them transferred into a more appropriate section for credit.  I don't have a lot of sympathy for the senior in the intro class who refuses to do the work.  I'm perfectly willing to come to an arrangement of looking the other way if the senior who does all the work and can do it with minimal attention paid to the lecture wants to hide in the back and quietly read or write during the boring bits.  That seems fair to me.

[concordancia]

Grassy, I totally agree about the students who distract from the actual level of the course - and I was probably that student at a few points.

But there was this one case... Major Advisor at Transfer U insisted that Intro I and Intro II were requirements, even though I had received an A in an undergrad/ grad split course at Previous Institution, whose final project used the skills of Intro I and Intro II to produce a project 3x as involved. Well, Intro II fit into my schedule the first semester, and was taught by Major Advisor, who almost immediately started calling me Ms. Encyclopedia, calling on me just because no one else would speak up and otherwise attempting to turn me into the teacher's pet.

And seriously, I am pretty good at entertaining myself, but there is only so much you can do when the lecture is a repetition of the reading: I learn better via reading, so I was keeping up with the assigned readings, but I had to be in class for participation points. I am surprised that one or two of those teachers actually gave me the participation points. But then, I rarely, if ever, actually challenged their authority in the ways that some of my students attempt to do - I never asked why we had to do a certain activity, I never asked nitpicky questions about my own tests or assignments in class...

And actually, I didn't catch on to the boredom part until late in the game. In a couple of cases, I was driving the prof crazy by asking really specific questions about concepts or examples: I figured if it didn't quite make sense to me, it probably didn't make sense to my colleagues. Turns out, in a lot of cases, so much of it didn't make sense that they were perfectly happy to just memorize the data and move right along.

[grasshopper]

I just don't think that being an obnoxious PITA is a particularly useful strategy. So your advisors forced you to take courses that were below you. And? Why should the rest of the class suffer because of your sorry situation?

[polly_mer]

I just don't think that being an obnoxious PITA is a particularly useful strategy. So your advisors forced you to take courses that were below you. And? Why should the rest of the class suffer because of your sorry situation?

If people are going to act as jailers, then I'm going to act like a prisoner.  It's got nothing to do with the other students in the class.  Yes, it's immature, but I was (and am) way, way past the point at which I'm going to collude in pretending that something is for my own good when it obviously isn't.  Either make a compelling case for why I have to do more than toe the line or make it important enough for me to pretend to care.  I don't necessarily want to be a jerk, but (a) I was required to pay good money for education so (b) I am damn well going to get an education or file complaints.  It may not be the instructor's fault that I'm in the wrong class that is beneath me, but it is the instructor's responsibility to somehow make this freakin' required class worth my while to attend. 

I'll do all the reading, homework, and prep work.

I'll participate in all the discussions to the best of my ability.

But in return, doing those things had damn well better be worth my while for both the money I paid and the time I've invested.  Repeating third grade because the people around me didn't pass the first time so the college made it mandatory isn't in my best interests and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

Surely, you, Grasshopper, have been subjected to enough mandatory waste-of-time meetings and trainings to have some sympathy with stupid requirements that are just huge wastes of time for some of the people involved because there isn't any educational component and the only lesson learned is "I'm holding something you want hostage so dance monkey".

[grasshopper]

Oh, come on, Polly. You sound ridiculous. Yes, yes, you enjoy playing devil's advocate, but this is silly. You know that you wouldn't stand for such asinine shenanigans in your classroom any more than I would. In fact, I believe I've heard you detail many, many times over this past year the ways in which you've put know-it-all students in their places. 

[polly_mer]

Oh, come on, Polly. You sound ridiculous. Yes, yes, you enjoy playing devil's advocate, but this is silly. You know that you wouldn't stand for such asinine shenanigans in your classroom any more than I would. In fact, I believe I've heard you detail many, many times over this past year the ways in which you've put know-it-all students in their places. 

The point I am trying to make is that some people are in the wrong classes and it is the role of instructors to make sure that people who are in that situation get what they need.  If that's a private talking to about a situation that cannot be remedied, but needs to be endured (possibly by being ignored in the back of the room while reading a book during the stupid parts) and both parties need to be aware of that.

Perhaps you have never encountered that, but I have been on both sides of it and I can tell you that it absolutely positively sucks as a student to be put in that situation with no remedy.

I agree that that situation is far less common than the little darlings who insist that they know it all and therefore refuse to try or do "busywork", engage in the bad behaviors, fail, and then pitch a fit.  That doesn't mean that the situation cannot be real and that perhaps it's worth checking to see which case is valid on an individual basis (via private talk) with repeated bad behavior.

No, I'm not going to tolerate the behavior, but I'm also checking to see whether the problem is a stupid student who doesn't know what isn't known or a very smart student who needs a wake-up knock in the head about the fact that college isn't high school.

[mountainguy]

I take a position somewhere between Grassy's and Polly's that while being disruptive in class is something that should be avoided generaly, I can understand why it happens.

I was never a deliberate loudmouth in class (at least I hope I wasn't), but there were times when I'd get so exasperated with the instructor or other students that I'd do quietly disruptive things. I especially remember one course--an upper-division philosophy seminar--in which the instructor allowed students to do things in discussion like pound their fists, interrupt, or go on long tangents. There were several times when I'd had enough of one guy's rambling in particular and would literally stand up, walk out of the room, go to the vending machine and get a soda, and come back ten minutes later while the discussion was still ongoing. In retrospect, it was poor behavior on my part, but the instructor never asked me to stop. And I figure it was better than me telling the other student to "shut up" or otherwise actively obstruct him from contributing to the discussion.

[chaosbydesign]

You know, I'm not at all qualified to comment from a teaching point of view as I haven't started teaching yet (just reading about these PITA students makes me wonder what I'm going to encounter in the classes I'm teaching next semester) but I can comment on this from the point of view of a student taking a class that they don't really need to be taking.

I'm going to be taking a class that covers the basics of what I have been working on for the past year, and having looked at the course materials, I know that I absolutely do not need to be taught the material in this class. I know it inside out, and I actually know how to do things that have advanced from the methods being taught because for some inexplicable reason they are teaching methods that have now been replaced and are no longer used. I'll be bored and unchallenged and pretty much wasting my time in that class. That being said, I don't see any reason why the professor should try to make the class more interesting for me. I don't think it is the professor's job to find material beyond what I already know to teach me that is not meant to be a part of the class just to keep me interested -- it's not the professor's fault that I know all this material, and the professor has an entire class full of students who don't know the material, and teaching it to them is far more important than keeping the one student who does know it entertained. I'm also not going to be the smart ass jerk sitting in class and pointing out to the professor where they are teaching old no-longer-used methods and saying 'well X is used now, not Y', and I'm not going to be the student who doesn't turn up to any classes because they know all the material already. Sometimes it is necessary to do things we just don't want to do, and if that involves sitting in a class listening to a professor tell us something we already know, then so be it. I don't want to be that disruptive student who detracts from the learning of other students just because the class is not challenging.

The only time I'll bring up my knowledge of the subject area will be in group discussions, because I think that having had hands on experience of doing something makes it much easier to discuss and explain, and I think I will be able to provide useful information in group discussions that will help the other students. That is not to say that I will monopolise the discussion with 'well I've done this X amount of times and this is how it is' etc, but if a student is finding it difficult to, for example, grasp the concept of QRT-PCR, then listening to someone describe how it is actually done might help in the understanding of the stages described in the textbook or lectures.

Yes, I'm paying to take a class I don't need to take, and yes it will be boring, but the reality is that I have to take that class whether I want to or not, I really don't think it is up to the professor to make it 'worthwhile' to me. It really is possible to take a class that is 'beneath' you without acting like an idiot because of it.

[concordancia]

I just don't think that being an obnoxious PITA is a particularly useful strategy. So your advisors forced you to take courses that were below you. And? Why should the rest of the class suffer because of your sorry situation?

Umm, I did say I didn't realize what I was doing - particularly in terms of asking questions that were distracting for the rest of the class. I was trying to get things straight and none of these teachers ever did what I would do if a student lead is in an inappropriate direction - they never asked me to talk to them about it in office hours instead.

[frogfactory]

I just don't think that being an obnoxious PITA is a particularly useful strategy. So your advisors forced you to take courses that were below you. And? Why should the rest of the class suffer because of your sorry situation?

Umm, I did say I didn't realize what I was doing - particularly in terms of asking questions that were distracting for the rest of the class. I was trying to get things straight and none of these teachers ever did what I would do if a student lead is in an inappropriate direction - they never asked me to talk to them about it in office hours instead.

I was a bit like this myself, although I don't think I realised I was being a PITA.  I had the idea, I think, that the faster we got through the material, the more we would be able to cover per session, and I was genuinely interested to learn.  Therefore, I would wait no more than a second or two between the group tutor (professor) asking a question about the material to allow someone else to answer it before giving the answer so we could move on.  I also kind of assumed that if it was easy for me, it'd be easy for the rest of the group and they were just being shy/quiet in not answering.

Never got smacked down or asked to give the other students in my tutor group a chance to respond - it probably would have made me think if I had.