Theory 1 sounds like the atmosphere at my high school. Some of my teachers there went from boring and dismissive to interesting and friendly once you’d made the conscious choice to be in their class.
At university I found the same thing you did—in the Linguistics department the lecturers were uniformly friendly and happy to bring up tidbits about their lives, while in computer science the level of engagement was… uneven, to say the least.
Theory 1 sounds like the atmosphere at my high school. Some of my teachers there went from boring and dismissive to interesting and friendly once you’d made the conscious choice to be in their class.
At university I found the same thing you did—in the Linguistics department the lecturers were uniformly friendly and happy to bring up tidbits about their lives, while in computer science the level of engagement was… uneven, to say the least.