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respect by practicing classroom etiquette It was the typical Wednesday night routine with class starting at 7 p.m., a 10-minute break at 8 p.m. and an early release at about 9:20 p.m. My law and ethics professor started a few minutes after the chimes, and the class seemed alert, responsive and ready to learn. One short hour later, it was time for a gift from the professor: Our 10-minute break. Wednesday’s class seemed as if nothing was out of the ordinary. However, when relief time was over, the classroom took on a different look. In a decent-sized room that is normally filled to the brim, almost one-third of the classroom became student-free for the second half of the lecture. The professor made a small joke about the absences, and although it may have not bothered her much, it bothered me to see the row of empty seats. Classroom etiquette — or rather basic student courtesy — seems to have fallen though the cracks for a lot of students at TCU. When classroom renovations took over TCU last summer, designers should have reconstructed classroom behavior as well. Don’t kid yourself in thinking that your professor doesn’t mind when you eat lunch during lecture, talk over them when they are instructing the class and fail to come back after 10-minute breaks. Even when professors cease to express their disappointment toward such actions, deep down it has to bother them enough to matter. I can’t count how many times students actually lay down their heads on their desktops and sleep in the middle of lecture. If a student is bold enough to take such an action, he or she should just stay home and get some quality sleep. Proper etiquette entails keeping yourself from yawning too much so it’s not insulting to the professor. Talking above the professor has to be insulting as well. If hearing another student impairs my ability to learn during a lecture, one can’t imagine how much it must bother the person who has spent time preparing for the instruction beforehand. My solution: Either learn to talk more softly or pick up some habits on being quiet. Looking attentive and being responsive, even if that means simply nodding your head and keeping eye contact, is another way to improve classroom behavior. It’s not that hard, and in the process one might pick up some part of the lecture he or she may have missed otherwise. Another bad habit upon which students have leached themselves is not turning off their cell phones and pagers before class. This not only interrupts the professor, it annoys fellow students to no end. Either learn to put your phone on silent ring, turn it off or just leave the silly thing in your car — the classroom is no place to hear a phone ringing or a pager beeping. Basically, learn to use the golden rule when it comes to being a student. Put yourself in the shoes of a professor and ask yourself how you would like your students to behave during class lecture. It’s really not that difficult of a task, and the benefits for both parties far outweigh the costs of adhering to such conduct. Nobody expects a student to be perfect in class, and I am just as guilty of having bad classroom habits as the next guy. However, that doesn’t means students shouldn’t try to better themselves even in the smallest way. Therefore, as a late Lenten season promise to yourself or a belated New Year’s resolution, make an attempt to better your classroom behavior for the second-half of this semester. Perhaps you may surprise yourself, shock your professors and make the TCU classroom a little more superior in the process.
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