Overheard: Tales from the Professoriate II

Today I spent several hours rotating through groups of new freshman with two other faculty members. The idea is to give the new students advice for succeeding at SLAC. They students were quiet and worn out from a few days of orientation already. My colleagues, however, were another matter.

One is a senior faculty member who is fabulous. He really cares about students, thinks deeply, chooses his words carefully and easily connects with students who are maybe 35 years younger than him. He was great. The other colleague is another senior faculty member. She has a partial administrative appointment that has a lot of interaction with students. Once she loosened up, things got interesting:

"I'm just amazed when a student comes in and says 'I juuuust fiiiind thaaat class soooooo booooooring'. Well! Any MORON can be bored in a class! It takes...Cre-A-TIV-ity and in-TELL-igence to find a class interesting!"

I wish I were making this up. Of course, this doesn't fully capture the emotion she put into it. For example, the imitation of the bored student 'I juuuust fiiiind thaaat class soooooo booooooring' included slurring each word with her tongue hanging out of her mouth.

I try to get us back on track with:

"I think the take home message from this is that we'll all end up taking classes we are less excited about - we take them for requirements of the college, or major, whatever. But, as long as you are there, you might as well make the most of it!"

After all this interaction with colleagues, I'm looking forward to seeing the students on Monday.