Bridget Jones' Classroom

Just recently, a new colleague in my department experienced every professor’s worst nightmare. She forgot to go to class. On the first day.

See what happened was that, in her head, she mixed up the time of her class as being in the afternoon rather than in the morning. Her husband, also an instructor at the university, was in their shared office that morning and called her at home to say that her students were in the office, confused about their class.

She handled it like a pro, though. The next day in class, she began by introducing herself and asked, “Let’s break the ice by describing something stupid that we’ve done. Let me start…..”

After hearing about this, I realized that after teaching in higher education for fifteen years, I have quite a few stories of my own goofiness in the classroom. I believe I may rival Bridget Jones in her general inability to make it through any given day without lipstick on her teeth and her skirt tucked into her pantyhose (both things I’ve done, by the way).

In fact, just last month, I railed on my students for having such poor grammar that they were writing in incomplete sentences. I believe I said something like, “Really, at this level [it was a 300-level class] you should be writing in complete sentences.” Instead of marking the errors in their papers, I put a number in the margin next to a sentence with an error. The number corresponds to a punctuation and style key that tells students about the error and offers suggestions for fixing it. I passed out the key impatiently and told the students to get cracking on correcting the errors. The next day, a student pointed out my own proofreading error on the style key in which I wrote “to” instead of “two.” Awesome.

Once I was looking at a syllabus I had passed out a few years ago advising students to buy any “addition” of the novel they wanted. I also accidentally photocopied a summer school class application, which included my social security number, on the back page of a syllabus. And about ten years ago, I wrote to a student that “for all intensive purposes” she was set to pass the class. Oh yeah.

But my fumbling as a professor goes beyond the occasional typo. I’ve tripped over a trash can, kicked off a shoe during a particularly active discussion, backed into a black board which left chalk dust on my butt, and farted while I slid off a table I was sitting on (though the table creaked a lot so I don’t think anyone heard).

This of course doesn’t even touch all the technological boo boos I’ve made. While trying to turn on the classroom’s Smart Board, I angered it so much that the board’s lights flashed red and made a beep beep beeeeeeeeeeep noise that sounded like a heart monitor on a dying patient in a Meg Ryan movie. In another class, I couldn’t get the slide clicker/laser pointer to work, and after changing the battery and restarting the computer, I had to have an IT staffer show me the on/off switch on the clicker itself.

And I know I’m not the only teacher who’s been Bridget Jones-ing it in the classroom, so I’m leaving this column intentionally short to allow editions…..wait…..additions by readers (either who are teachers or who, as students, have been witness to some pretty goofy things).