I’m up to my painfully-throbbing sinuses in final papers right now, but a friend forwarded this report from The Chronicle of Higher Education about the gendered nature of student incivility towards their instructors.
Surprise, surprise:
When it comes to being rude, disrespectful, or abusive to their professors, students appear most likely to take aim at women, the young, and the inexperienced.
Bullies bully those they perceive to be “weak”? Check. Women, even those with stellar credentials, are regarded as less authoritative than men? Check. Granted, the results were self-reported, and there was no breakdown regarding of the race of teachers or students, the type of school (SLAC, land-grant college, Ivy league, etc.), or discipline.
I’ve been fairly fortunate where I teach; the students are eager to get good grades (and sometimes actually learn), and they’ve had the sort of privileged upbringings that means they mostly channel their aggression into pissing and moaning outside of class.
But I have, this year, dealt with crap I thought only happened in the first third of those “inspirational” movies about idealistic white teachers in minority, inner-city classrooms. Okay, it hasn’t been anything like that, but still. Students sleeping in class? I ignore it at the time, provided they’re not snoring, and drop them a note asking them to please stay home. Texting? You will get disinvited from my class, tout de suite. Talking? It varies. Last week I reprimanded the same student (a dude I will call “Dudent”) multiple times. Apparently, he didn’t hear me because he was yapping–loudly–to his deskmate. Finally:
DUDENT! I’ve asked you, I’ve told you. You don’t have to listen, but you do have to let others do so. Either be quiet or get out.
Maybe a little harsh. At least I didn’t say “shut the fuck up.” I was sorely tempted.
Most of that sort of behavior is from dudes, as are the “Oh, my printer ran out of toner, can I email you my paper after class?” and “I totally misread the syllabus and thought that X was due next week” excuses. Women who blow deadlines might say “I misread the syllabus,” but offer that as part of an apology, which: okay? It’s not personal, and the policy is the same: no late papers will be accepted. Female students are generally more likely to grade-grub, but they don’t interrupt class. And we’re just scratching the surface of gender generalizations.
We’ve got a swath of educators among our readers: how does this study square with your experience?
I’m not an educator, but I’d like to give you a standing ovation for your response to Dudent.
I once taught under a women’s-studies prof who is conducting an ongoing (totally unscientific) survey, wherein she asks professors if they have ever had remarks about their bodies/clothing in student feedback or communication. She reports that 100% of tenured female professors have had such remarks, compared to 0% of tenured male professors. Possibly an exaggeration, but believable. Really hateful stuff too: “You are so fat that I have trouble focusing on lectures.” (Not that it should matter, but we are not talking about an obese or even very overweight woman here.) Unbe-fucking-lievable, the cheek on those kids.
Also when I was a TA, I had no problem with telling students to shut up, in so many words: “You have to shut up, or leave now.” I’m out of academia per se, and am now a librarian, so my silencing skills have transferred nicely.
I teach two classes this semester. One is a campus wide requirement, and the other is a much harder class only some elect. My uncivil students are almost all in the required class.
I think the problem comes when a student takes a class that is not their choice.
But YEAH the women in that class are not uncivil. The men ARE. It looks like the women are more accustomed to not getting their way, and the men are NOT.
BTW one thing I don’t do is call them out for surfing the web while in class. It’s just a lost cause. Again, just in the required class.
@rodriguez
This Special Snowflake Syndrome does not go away in medical school. We had a biostats professor (a woman) who was no-nonsense and blunt. My friends and I all loved and respected her, the boys were not so keen on her teaching style. They bitched and complained that she was too gruff and antagonistic and were thrilled when she resigned from her position (after numerous complaints, most unfounded). It’s a sad but common phenomenon.
I agree, male students are incredibly disrespectful to female professors. During my first year teaching I had multiple male students who didn’t think I had any power to give them poor grades. They spent the first half of the semester writing “funny” or “asshole” answers in their quizzes. It wasn’t until half way through that they realized I was grading them and that I could fail them. Even now, I have two male students who continuously come in late and always make excuses for not having papers turned in on time.
Also – on a side note, I have to deal with younger male masters students (as I am a PhD student) and a male undergraduate student in my own department who seem to think they are more important than me. I am beginning to think that they believe that their dicks give them status over me even though I am a more advanced student. I even had one tell me I was wrong in my own research – something that little asshole knew nothing about!
*sorry for the anger – it has been a long semester and it cannot end soon enough!
I confess to having been a complete bitch when I was a TA, but it was a chemistry lab, so I feel pretty justified (Freshmen? Dangerous chemicals? Bring on the Drill Sergeant!). That said, I was only ever called a bitch by guys. The chemistry requirements for pre-med and nursing students guaranteed the lab was filled with people who (a)didn’t want to be there and (b)viewed the class as a barrier to med school, but the more annoying women reacted by grade grubbing and setting up shop every single office hour and the more annoying men reacted by calling me names every time their grades didn’t meet their expectations or they got yelled at for adding water to acid.
Oh, for a class of non-traditional students. They still grade grub, but they ALWAYS follow safety instructions.
@Rodriguez – they surf the web during class? I’m gobsmacked, no really I am – this shows how old I am that I simply can not imagine someone surfing the web during a lecture. I do remember falling asleep during the odd lecture but that was about it. I tend to think that if you’re actually in tertiary education then you should want to be there and pay attention.
@PhDork – the grade grubbing is interesting to me – I’d never experienced it until I went to the US to study where it seemed really common. Then when i did my third MA (don’t ask I am a serial MA collector) back in the UK the only people affronted by grades on a regular basis were the two Americans in the class.
I always wondered if the difference in attitude was down to the fact that back then UK students didn’t have to pay for their education and so felt less entitled regarding their grades (if so it’s probably changed now that UK students pay tuition fees), possibly we were also more brainwashed into accepting that the professor was the professor and thus their grades were law.
I have seen this occur as a student in a class. I once took a stats course taught by a young woman from India with a fairly pronounced accent. Not too long into semester, the class completely turned on her. They started complaining that they couldn’t understand her, saying that she couldn’t speak English. One day we showed up for class and the instructor wasn’t there. Instead someone from the department (maybe a dean?) was there to “lead a discussion” and “address our concerns.” It turned into a vicious hatefest about this poor young woman. I still regret that I didn’t do more to stand up for her beyond stating that I didn’t have any problem understanding her. The memories are hazy, but I think after that the class was observed a few times, and we may have gotten a replacement instructor for the remainder of the semester. These students decided that a young, non-white woman did not have the authority to teach them and effectively drove her out of the classroom.
I’ve been a teaching assistant for an undergrad astronomy course. I had one male student who *always* had his laptop out while I was teaching. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was taking notes. Then I found out he was actually googling what I was saying during section, in order to challenge me in front of the class, which I discovered the one time he actually raised his hand to say “well, Wikipedia says so-and-so instead of what you just said.” I usually try to speak at the level of the student’s abilities (it was a course for non-majors, while I am a graduate student in the field), but this time I calmly unleashed a brutal smackdown of scientific jargon about why the Wikipedia point was not relevant. It felt instinctually like the right thing to do, since I got the vibe that this was not a legitimate inquiry, but a challenge to my authority to teach. So the best way to handle it was to definitively establish that I knew my shit. I never had a female student “test” me like that.
I saw a bit of this back when I was tutoring high school students. The girls had issues, but respect usually wasn’t one of them. The boys sometimes needed to be smacked down before they would drop the smart mouth and learn. Usually, I’d give them a particularly difficult problem, let them try it without any input, then go over in excrutiating detail where they went wrong. This was often the only way I could convince them that I actually knew what I was talking about. (It didn’t help that I was 17 and these students were, on average, 16.)
And that was just one-on-one tutoring with their scary male teacher hovering in the background. I shudder to think what thirty of them would have done.
Ooh, so many interesting issues already being raised here.
I’ll start by just contributing my experience: I teach in France, and the culture is much more authoritarian here, which means students are generally very reluctant to challenge the teacher. I have had a couple men act less respectfully than I expect, and no women do the same, and I did feel that gender played a role in both of those cases – it’s hard to say what gave me that impression, but I think the manner of speech, and in one case, a sort of aggressive towering over me, had something to do with it. (Neither were cases of grade-grubbing, by the way, but of students asking me to make exceptions to the rules for some inadequate reason or another). I just remained firm, and they had to respect that eventually.
Now about grade-grubbing: Emilyanne, don’t you think that could have something to do with the examination system? Because at my uni in England, all students sat the same exam, regardless of who had taught them; all exams were anonymous (we wrote down numbers instead of names); all exams were marked by two lecturers, who were also anonymous; and an external examiner was always part of the process to make sure standards were being upheld. We never saw our exam papers after we did them, we just got a number back at the end of the year. I have to say, I find this preferable to the way things are done in the US (and France) – it’s fairer to students, for sure, and also means that students who want to grade-grub wouldn’t even know which examiner to turn to! I know a few US academics who say they would hate a system like that because it inhibits their freedom to set the exams the way they want, but I often wish for that in France. When I write exams, I never know if my exam will be harder or easier than that of a colleague teaching what is supposed to be the exact same class, and feel that that’s unfair to the students, whose transcripts will look exactly the same, after all. Oh well, c’est la vie…
Of course, the British system is also expensive and time-consuming, but I think that’s a price worth paying for what you get.
I’ve been fortunate enough to take three classes with an amazing woman with her PhD; I’ll call her Dr. A.
On the first day of class, she said, “You can call me Dr. A____ or just Dr. A if that’s easier. You can even call me by my first name, M_____. But do not call me Ms. A_____. Or Mrs. A_____; that’s my mother-in-law.” She went on to say, “Funny how that never happens to men. People always called them Dr.”
Then she paused and said, “Must be the penis,” and she laughed.
It’s one of the reasons I love her; she’s never afraid to expose patriarchy and systems of oppression. I’ve taken her for Native studies classes; her grandmother was full-blooded (“Whatever that means,” as Dr. A. would say; blood laws are controversial) Chickasaw American Indian and her father emigrated from Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
She told the class that she would be in favor of affirmative action until a lesbian woman of color, who is differently-abled, non-Christian, and refers to her deity (if any) as “She,” is elected President of the United States — AND no one thinks it’s amazing or remarkable.
Mr. Peaches is a professor at a small college. He is a very young-looking POC and often mistaken for a student. His male students try to pull crap with him they’d NEVER pull with the older white profs. They treat him like his time is meaningless, argue about grades, tell him he’s teaching “wrong,” stand him up for 1-on-1 lessons, etc. The female students don’t do that. They just don’t. There aren’t that many of them (the department has very few female students) but the ones he has bust ass to do things right and treat him with respect. He doesn’t see it as a gender issue (he has a frustrating blind spot to gender issues) but the disrespect in general has been very disheartening for him, and it pisses me right off.
Not an educator, but as I’m back in grad school part-time 8 years after undergrad, I share emilyanne’s gobsmackedness about surfing in class. Since there was no wifi when I was in college, and few people had laptops, much less brought them to class, I had _no_ idea. Last week a woman spent the entire (2.75 hour) class switching between facebook and looking at pictures of cakes. She was right in my line of sight to the front of the room and it was REALLY distracting (I like cake and all, but). I would hate to be a prof looking out at a sea of laptops and know that most people probably aren’t giving you their full attention. Yes, in most classes some students aren’t paying full attention, but blatant surfing seems SO rude. And they’re PAYING for this class! Anyway, rant over, I know the ship has sailed, but GEEZ.
Also, I’ve heard from female friends/online people who are grad TAs that they put a lot of thought into what they wear, because they know people will care. My brother the PhD candidate talks about impressing the students with his funny tshirts. Which is fine, and he’s an awesome teacher, but I know most women couldn’t get away with that.
Also, laptops in class just sounds like a huge pain to me. More to carry around and all that.
I do remember exactly one person doing it exactly once at uni though, he got snickered at for being über-keen).
Endora – yes I do but that’s only in exams. I was amazed by people complaining about essay grades,when those grades were not part of the overall degree award. (But now i think about it maybe the grades did count for the US students because they were on their junior year abroad programme so that would explain why they complained).
My experiences as a TA were quite the opposite of what most of the comments have been: my (entitled and irritating) female students were the ones talking in class, or having mommy dearest (this was a college SENIOR’s mother, mind you) email me pitiful or bullying letters to get them better grades.
I didn’t realize until now how lucky I was that my male students were generally respectful and obedient. The worst I dealt with was the student or two every semester who was convinced flirting would result in better grades. Unsuccessful, but amusing to watch.
@Emilyanne – that would explain it. Especially when you consider how different the grading systems are – I’d imagine it can be challenging to explain to home universities that actually, a 70 is a very good grade…although you’d think they’d have systems in place for that kind of thing.
I teach high school. This behaviour is really prevalent there, too. My students (who are all issued laptops by the schools) surf the web in class, complain about their grades, stand me up for tutoring sessions, and basically pull all kinds of shit that would have me turf them out/fail their entitled arse in a college class in no time. However, this is public school (oh, did I mention, I teach ninth graders!), so that’s just not possible. What’s left is trying to teach, teach, teach, teach, respectful academic behaviour so that when they get to you guys at college, they might have some idea of how to behave.
And you know that while there are lots of things I love about the US- hey, I chose to live here!- I really do think that this very individualized, very entitled behaviour has roots in the individualism of US culture. It comes from a place of, I paid for this education, so you owe me/I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. Today’s teenagers definitely have more of a “you can’t tell me what to do. I have rights!” confidence than I and my peers did as teens. And they get backed up by their parents. I’m most full sure how I feel about this. I get that it has advantages, but far out can it be annoying.
@endora @ emilyanne 70 is a good grade!
That’s totally my experience, too. I am used to a grading scale where the whole 0-100 range is a possibility. When I grade on a scale where, realistically, only 65-100 is used, I have to be really careful to build in some participation grade for about the first 50-60 points, and then start the real grading, or people get upset!
I witnessed this when I was taking classes at a state school. The worst incident was in a features class, when this one brodude, Dave, would talk though class and be incredibly rude to the teacher. She finally kicked him out. He also grabbed my knee for no reason as he was passing me, and when I called him on it, he told me it was my fault for wearing a short skirt. I believe he was finally expelled after being arrested for rape at a frat party — great guy!
It makes me feel fortunate that I went to a women’s college for undergrad, where that kind of stuff wasn’t acceptable.
In my recent math studies, I’ve only had male teachers, but have noticed that the foreign ones with accents get treated like crap by the class bros. Very uncool.
Tardy to the party here, but…I taught several semesters at (concurrently) a private university, a public university, and a public community college, in the same Midwest city. Across the board, I would have a couple of young bucks give me grief/flirt with me to test me and I’d gently have to smack them down, to regain control of the classroom space.
Grade-grubbing did seem to be universal though- which weirded me out more than anything. When I was an undergrad I wouldn’t have DREAMED of asking for a better grade or making excuses.
And don’t even get me started on technology in the classroom- I answered a student’s phone once in class (after fair warning)…never had that problem again.
@JetGirl: That story is horrifying. I have no idea what I would do if that happened to me.
@SkiptomyLou: I’m not sure how much more accurate the British system really is, the grades used are just different, essentially on a score of 45-85 instead of 65-100…The French system, on the other hand, does spread grades out more, but they are too stingy – about half of the class will usually fail.
I’ve been a grad student for a while but this is my first semester being a GTA. It’s an unusual setup in that I have complete control over my class, in terms of what I teach, and the grading. (The flip side of that is that I have no official person to turn to for help, and if my students don’t like something, I can’t just blame it on department policy.) We have a very casual department, where all the professors go by their first name, so naturally the GTAs also go by their first name. For the most part my students have warmed up to me; they are about 80% frosh non-majors with a few transfer students from community colleges. Universally, the transfer students know how to behave. They turn things in on time and give me fair warning when they can’t come to lab. My frosh students email me 10 minutes after class has started to tell me they’re sick. I have a problem in that I care far less about, er, standard work type things, and grades, than I do about my students learning. If it were up to me I wouldn’t assign grades but write evaluations. Unfortunately this is not UCSC and I can’t do that. But what ends up happening is my students take my lack of emphasis on grading as an excuse to slack off and grade-grub at the same time. I decided to deal with this by saying that the only way I would change a grade on something is that students would have to come to my office hours, or make an appointment with me, and they could earn back points by showing they understood. Unsurprisingly, no one has done that.
I honestly can’t tell if the students who do things that I consider disrespectful (showing up late, texting in lab, not turning things in on time) are doing it because I look young, because I’m inexperienced, or because I’m female. But it’s not my male students doing that–probably a statistical fluke, I only have 5 male students in 26 total students.
I have also figured out that what little authority I’ve managed to maintain has come from 1) authority on the subject matter, and 2) organization. If I show up without an agenda on the board, people start to push my boundaries, asking if they can leave early or whatnot. And so far, no one has questioned how knowledgeable I am about the material, despite my being assigned to a class I only know about 60% of the material for. I am, literally, a week ahead of my students some weeks, but apparently acting like I know science, in general, while they are completely unconfident about it, has them impressed. Or something.
Yes and no. I’m a TA at a supposedly prestigious, high-ranked and very expensive university and so I get a fair amount of crap from my (mostly very privileged) students – but from women as well as men. This semester was interesting, because I actually had a good number of continuing education students in my class (so older and more motivated – they’re there because they *want* to be, not because mommy and daddy said so and are paying their way). I also had several students who were there because their parents work at the university, so for them being able to go to a school of this caliber was something they wouldn’t otherwise afford. This group also was more motivated and less complaining.
But my regular students? Dear Maude! Texting during class. Cheating openly. Looking up answers on their iPhones instead of looking at the material available in the lab – even after I told them multiple times not to, and warned that I would deduct points if I caught them. Complaining about getting poor grades on the quizzes, because obviously the problem is that my (very easy) quizzes were too hard, not that they didn’t study!! “But…but…I’ve always gotten A’s, why not now?” And women were as bad at this as men.
But I’ve also hired and worked with dozens of field assistants over the years, and amongst the assistants the men are *far* worse about challenging me and generally causing problems. I’d say at least half of the men I’ve worked with have openly challenged my methods and abilities (when I’m the one who designed and is running the project, and who has years of experience), and/or have complained constantly, not to mention the two who resented the fact that our work got in the way of their partying. Whereas only 1-2 women have ever given me any problems. Though again, those from more privileged backgrounds (especially the Brits, for whatever reason, but also some Americans) are more difficult, whereas local Central American assistants I’ve hired have been far more pleasant to work with (men and women alike).
So it’s a mixed bag in my case, and class/background factors in as much as does sex.
Oh and yeah…the flirting. I had one student from Nicaragua who was very handsome and charming and obviously used to getting his way with women, professors or otherwise. What he didn’t take into consideration that I had already spent enough time in Nicaragua around Nicaraguan men that I was immune to the charm he tried to turn on. It was amusing, though! One of the Americans tried it, too, but he could have used some lessons from M – he was pretty sloppy!
A flip side of the teachers of color/accent getting disrespected is that I never had a moment’s trouble from any student of color, including the Americans. I assume it’s an entitlement issue – I pass for white, and even as a woman, that makes me more privileged than most of the POC students. My trouble always came from white males.
I’m not a fan of laptops in the class, because most of the time they’re being used for something other than note-taking. There was another story in the Chronicle recently about a prof who analyzed her students and discovered that those who used their computers in class did worse on exams. Not a big enough sample to generalize from, but not surprising, either.
Dudent always had his lappy with him, and would play music audibly before class, and then google things to chime in on during lecture and discussion, as if google-fu = smarts, and access to random facts = knowledge. I kinda dislike Dudent.
I had no idea laptops in class were so prevalent. Then again, I’m at a small and admittedly somewhat backward college. But, really high school freshmen? Someone thought that was a good idea?
So, I saw this the other day when it came out, and all I can say is…well, duh. Though I will say that some of the behaviors considered “disrespectful” on the list (i.e. texting) are so tame compared to the sorts of things that I *have* experienced that I don’t even pay attention when they happen anymore.
I teach at a very expensive university that is populated largely by very smart students who believe that they should have gotten accepted to an Ivy, but settled for our fairly-prestigious school. I have taught my fair share of entitled dude-bros, at least 4 of whom have openly challenged my authority/knowledge of the subject matter in class. Another replied, after I reprimanded him, that he would continue to answer his phone in my class, no matter what I said about it. Another male student who I caught cheating said that I was “insulting his integrity” and demanded to meet with me at a time and place of his choosing (i.e., not in my office, during my office hours).
I’ve had grade-grubbing from women and men, but I honestly don’t think twice about it. And ever since I instituted a no-laptops-in-class policy, the googling/youtubing problem has been basically solved.
But yeah, the disrespect and hostility? Totally there. Totally (as far as I’m concerned) gendered. And, honestly, probably exacerbated because I teach so much feminist philosophy.
Oh man I bring my laptop to class all the time. I type infinitely faster than I write, so I use my laptop to take notes. Though, I am a grad student, and all my professors know that I’m very serious about my work. So I doubt anyone thinks I am messing about on facebook during a lecture.
This subject came up this semester for my partner. He’s a huge guy, white, looks very stern and professorial, and the other TAs he worked with called him the enforcer. He used to go up to students if they were fucking around on their laptops during lecture, in front of 150 kids, and ask them politely to turn it off. He said every time, they turned white and got so scared and did it. But he worked with a short Korean lesbian, and she had a hell of a time getting her kids to respect her. Some of the stories he told me about her students were infuriating. I think she might also have some sort of personality disorder, based on the way she’d act around my partner and the way she’d ask him for advice. It’s hard because it seems to me that in Korea, the formal/informal personal/non-of-your-business lines are drawn differently, and she has trouble figuring out how to navigate this stuff. It doesn’t help that her department is totally useless in this regard.
In a year I’ll be a TA for a school that only gives undergrads As, Bs, and Cs, apparently. Like, if you give them below a C then they just drop the class. I don’t really understand how this works, but I’m assuming it has to do with 1. being the “weird” university, or priding themselves on some pseudo hippy dippy reputation, and 2. destressing the undergrads. It will be interesting to see how my classes go, especially because I’ll be teaching both super dead white dude classic stuff (Shakespeare) but also feminist studies, seeing as my concentration is feminist Shakespeare studies. I’m hoping that the students I met at the prospective weekend were right–they told me that all their undergrad students were “baby geniuses” and were a delight to teach. So we’ll see.
Last semester I got these exact quotes in my evals: “she’s hawt but she grades to hard. she should be more helpful and unerstanding.” and
“she’s really funny and knowlegable but this class is to damn hard.”
First of all, it’s a symbolic logic class. It can’t not be hard. Second, the department openly acknowledges the fact that male instructors get fewer comments about how hard the class is than female instructors even though we all cover roughly the same stuff and use either the same textbooks or very similar ones. Finally, do they not teach the too/to distinction in spelling or grammar classes anymore? I think I learned this in like 4th grade.
As a Sociology minor, I took a series of inequality classes (race, gender, age, etc). In my race class, an older, nontraditional, white, married man with 5 children who always wore either a Nascar or confederate flag hat sat in front of me. Our prof started off the semester by watching a small documentary, the main point of which was that POC were typically non-existent in the mass media unless they represented a stereotype or a punchline. The guy in front of me, let’s call him Bubba, argued that the entire documentary was untrue because, “they have BET and UPN. Why do they need to be on our channels too?”. He spent the entire semester interjecting with his racist, sexist, and homophobic opinions with absolutely no facts to back him up. At one point when we were discussing poverty, he moaned, “I don’t see why they just don’t stop complaining and pull themselves up by their boot straps.”. To which I replied, “that’s only possible if you’re born with the boot.”. I never interrupted our prof, though, only Bubba when he would get on a tirade. He argued about every fact proving that AA’s face more obstacles than whites to the prof and seemed to believe we should take his opinion as fact just because he was white and had a penis.
The next semester he was also in my gender inequality class and I was ready to verbally smack him. In this course, however, he raised his hand to argue points and never interrupted the prof (who often ignored him), only other, female students. One day he was arguing that Women were not only equal, and treated that way, but actually had more priviledge than men because his brother’s divorce court wouldn’t agree to equal, joint custody and his brother was forced to pay child support. I interrupted him by telling him and tge whole class that his story was an irrelevant anectdotal story which didn’t prove universal priviledge over men. As I was continuing telling him his opinions were irrelevant, he became angry and interrupted me, “what do you know about it anyway?”. To which I replied, “I have a vagina and because of that one fact, I will be paid less than you, who cannot formulate a coherent argument based on anything other than your sexist opinions. I know this which is more than what you know. And this University hosts a philosophy department who offers critical thinking classes, I highly suggest you take one.”. Bubba began sputtering, trying to come back with something and the prof stopped him and told him that I was right. He dropped tge class after that day.
The difference between the two courses and whether Bubba interrupted the prof or raised his hand to do so politely was that in the first course, the prof was a woman and Bubba had no problem with interupting her and in the second course, the prof was a man who Bubba respected enough to raise his hand before derailing the lecture.
I’m an assistant professor at a big state research university. When I read The Chronicle article, I thought “Yeah. That makes sense,” even though it didn’t fit my personal experiences as an instructor. Like many of the commenters, I’ve been antagonized and challenged in class by male students, usually in the graduate class I teach. But I think that has usually lead to grudging respect. Unfortunately, I’ve typically had one or two female students who, rather than challenging me, take the character assassination approach. This drives me up the wall.
It does seem to be a gendered phenomenom – in my experience, disrespectful and derailing behaviour has come from males.
One particular incident was 1-on-1 consultations about essays with students where students who wanted to ask questions to improve their future essay writing could do so; all students were told that grades would not be adjusted. All of the consults were productive except one, who wanted his essay mark changed to a higher one. A white privileged male who proceeded to raise his voice and lean over me.
I named his behaviour, “bullying behaviour doesn’t get you better marks, writing better essays does. If you continue to try to intimidate me, I will have no option but to go to the chair of the discipline. Then not only can you speak with the chair about your essay, but what happens to students who try to intimidate and bully staff.”
The consultation finished then by him, and he didn’t bother the chair about the essay either.
About the laptop thing:
I just finished my undergrad degree this semester, and in just about every class I had there was always someone who has a laptop out on their desk. It seems like in lecture-type classes people are usually just screwing around on them and not paying attention at all (although I have seen some note taking on laptops).
In a discussion-type class, though, laptops can be really helpful. I’ve had a few professors who, if they’re unsure of some specific piece of information relevant to the discussion, will ask one of the laptop users to google it, or look up a wiki page. In some instances it can really help the discussion to have access to that information right then and there, and it also keeps the laptop users on task, knowing that they might be asked to do that at any moment.
Also, my dad is a professor and he always gets (sometimes mean) comments about his clothing. Couldn’t tell you why. So it definitely does happen to men as well, although probably not as often.