Seems pretty harmless to me. Most of the first ten minutes of the first session of class is spent twiddling your thumbs and waiting for stragglers to show up anyway.
Back when I taught Freshman Comp, I was told that it was common for teachers to show up deliberately late simply to avoid those first few minutes where you’re standing in front of class fidgeting and waiting for the lost to show up.
At least this way you get a laugh out of it and (presumably) make a good impression.
Heh. That story about the Reporting professor who was robbed at banana-point reminds me of the prof I had who was served with divorce papers. He actually slammed the door on the guy and tried to hide. Probably not the same thing, though.
I had a TA do this once. He didn’t even have to hide a sport coat, he was just a grad student teaching a class with a healthy mix of grade levels, so he didn’t look out of place as a “student”.
I might be a bit uncomfortable, but I pretty much agree this is harmless.
Muffin’s story reminds me a bit of one of Feynmann’s stories about his first teaching job after the Manhattan Project. It’s been years since I read it, so I may have some details wrong. He’d go to student dances and when a girl asked him about himself would truthfully say he was an instructor and had worked on the A-bomb. He looked fairly young, so every girl would think he was bullshitting them and would give him a wide berth! He finally acted like a shy, reticent new student and this apparently awakened the girls’ maternal instinct and made him more popular.
I don’t generally get a wide berth from students. Most like me and my style however abnormal it is. Classes start after this weekend and I’m psyched for the first day. The summer has been long and fun [my first with no summer session to teach!] but I’m ready to start teaching again…very fun…plus I’ve spent WAAAAAY too much time on SDMB… I’ll still post in my spare time from school:)
I’ve been out of college for <mumble> years, but I’ve always preferred an informal, energetic approach in instructors. Frankly, if someone just stands and drones, my mind goes elsewhere, and my hand just scribbles notes (which may or may not be related to the class).
My most memorable class was my very first one in college. It was 8:30 on a Monday morning, and I was sitting rather nervously in a classroom that held more people than my high school. A history professor (one of five professors for the course) bounced in like a rubber brick and began telling a ludicrous story about a possessed washing machine he once owned. He soon had everyone in stitches. Afterwards, he explained that the purpose of the story was to introduce the idea of animism as it related to the subject of the class. Then he told us to read The Iliad for discussion the next day. (He wasn’t kidding, either–we discussed it in our seminar classes on Tuesday.) The fact that I remember the lecture a decade later surely shows that the approach was effective, at least with me.
My second most memorable class was probably the one in which my physics prof dunked his hand in liquid nitrogen and slammed it on a table, but that’s another story.
Sociology teacher had a bit more in depth ruse for us the first day.
It went along much as described in the OP. A “student” got up and started shuffling through the desk, found a class roster, declared they were the teacher and started taking attendence… right about the time they would have begun teaching the class the real prof walks in and asks the “student” what the hell they think they’re doing. Had them sit down and then did a bit of business of being confused that the class roster had disappeared from his desk.
The first lecture was on the topic of Breaching, though, so most of us figured out the game before he finally revealed that the “student” was one of his TA/grad students by the end of the class.
I really liked that class.
I don’t see anything wrong with it. I always enjoyed the more personable professors, as opposed to the History prof. I had that read chapters out of our book as a lecture (after assigning us to read the same chapter the night before).
I find it hard to believe that some of the posters here would genuinely be upset over such a thing…
