Interlude

What started in the last post will be completed shortly.  In the meantime I offer a description of a less enjoyable experience for a grad student.  

This semester I'm a TA and one of my responsibilities is holding recitations.  In these sessions we review material covered in the lecture, I help with homework problems, and answer any questions the students may have.  In one of these recitation sessions I have maybe thirty kids.  Most of them are completely silent. But one kid, who sits in the back, answers my questions with a tone suggesting that everything I'm asking is pointlessly obvious.  His demeanor makes it hard for me to get other kids to speak up.  In trying to encourage broader participation I write something on the board and ask everyone who thinks that it's true to put their hands up.  No one does anything, except the kid in the back puts his hand up announces that it's true.  I then ask everyone who thinks the statement is false to put their hands up.  Half the students'  hands go up.  The statement is false and I commend the students who recognized this, although anyone who had done the reading would know the statement was false.  Then the kid in the back starts trying to argue that the statement is actually true.  I make a clear explanation appealing to pre-calculus level mathematics, but the kid in the back wont give up.

There is a small percentage of students who either can't tell or don't care that their actions are disruptive and annoying, and it's exhausting having them in class.  While I really want to tell them to take their social dysfunction somewhere else, I usually carefully explain that the way they are behaving is making it hard for me to do my job.  And always they get this surprised look on their face.  It makes me wonder how much I want an academic position.