I spent most of my life absolutely not understanding why a person would ask questions out loud in a classroom setting, with extra lack-of-understanding for people who disrupt classes with objections to the teacher’s content or style.
Eventually I was able to understand, through a lengthy conversation with different individuals having different points of view on the topic, that I have an unusually sensitive fear of public punishment and aversion to authority, probably ingrained in me by some specific classroom events of my childhood.
It depends. There is a difference between disruption with a goal to get more information, and a disruption for the sake of disruption. Some people disrupt classes because they don’t pay for them (state or parents pay), because they don’t care about the lesson, and disrupting a lesson is a method of signalling high status and reducing the amount of transferred knowledge.
Disrupting someone’s lesson shows your high status against them (attacking someone with impunity) and against your classmates (you had the courage to do it first). This is why having one disruptive student per classroom is often manageable (they assert their status, and are happy with it), but having two or three is a disaster (it becomes a competition between them).
Reducing transferred knowledge makes sense if you can later bargain that you shouldn’t be examined for knowledge you did not receive during the lesson (thus by disrupting you reduce your necessary learning for exams); and it also reduces your competitive disadvantage against classmates who try to pay attention during the lesson (this last motive was explicitly explained to me by a few extra rude students).
I did private teaching, teaching at public schools, and teaching employees. The behavior depends on whether the person comes to the lesson willingly, whether they are interested in topic, and whether they are in the age interval 13-17 (when they get most status from their peers for destructive behavior).
There is a difference between disruption with a goal to get more information, and a disruption for the sake of disruption. [...] disrupting a lesson is a method of signalling high status and reducing the amount of transferred knowledge.
I think you’re leaving out a category. My primary reason for asking questions or making comments during lectures is to signal high status (specifically, to show that I’m an unusually intelligent person who knows things that aren’t on the curriculum), but I’m not trying to be maliciously disruptive or hinder other people’s learning; rather, it’s somewhat gratifying, seemingly harmless, and most professors seem to like it (“class participation”).
I can remember enjoying disrupting classes by passing slambooks (informal surveys on paper—details available if anyone is interested). I didn’t do it for the sake of disruption—I was actually interested in the surveys, but I can remember the pleasure even if I don’t exactly feel it any more.
I hated school because it was boring. I didn’t exactly hate the teachers, but I didn’t have any concept that they might want to teach something.
I’m not sure that status explains this adequately, but from the inside it felt as least as much as that I wanted to feel as though I wasn’t of intractably low status rather than that I was trying to get higher status.
I hated school because it was boring. I didn’t exactly hate the teachers, but I didn’t have any concept that they might want to teach something.
Back when I was in highschool, a friend and I were accidentally sorted into a general level course, when by rights we should have been put in an AP-level course. Neither of us ever really got anything out of the teacher’s lectures, and were able to ace the tests purely on knowledge gained from reading the textbook; consequently, we were bored out of our minds in class, and amused ourselves by competing to lure the teacher off on increasingly interesting and increasingly irrelevant tangents. A side result of this was that the other students, who actually needed a the hear the subject explained by a teacher, got shafted. I should note, however, that neither of us had any real animosity towards the teacher or the students—in fact, we absolutely adored the teacher; rather than being a malicious attempt to disrupt the class, we saw it as merely a friendly game between the two of us that happened to negatively effect other people’s learning of the material—a consequence that we were indifferent towards.
A setting where one person is required to explain something and maintain discipline, and twenty persons don’t care about the subject and are bored to death… is pretty much doomed to be frustrating for all participants.
Is there a solution? Seems like an official solution is that every teacher is supposed to have some unspecified magical power which solves the problem. Confessing that I don’t have this kind of power is very bad signalling in school, but I honestly don’t, and I suspect neither do others. There is also a collection of non-magical powers (such as speaking clearly, putting things into proper context, inserting a few jokes, being fair and friendly, using analogies and pictures when necessary, etc) which sometimes work, but because of their lack of magic, they also sometimes fail. More often if someone is determined to make them fail, and there is no credible threat to stop them.
How to fix it? One possibility is to make the lesson interesting to everyone. However, “interesting” is not an inherent property of the lesson, not even of the lesson+teacher configuration. (Many people fail to recognize this. They think there is a way to make the lesson inherently interesting, and a good teacher should be able to make it so.) A solution would be to make the lesson voluntary, but that is incompatible with the compulsory education.
Other possibility is to cope with the boredom rationally; accept that it exists, that to some degree it is inevitable, and just try to minimize harm. Again, admitting this openly is bad signalling (that is, if a teacher admits it). How exactly would the rational solution look like? My offer would be “you can do what you want, as long as you are silent and do not distract me or your classmates, for example read a book, and there will be no consequences for doing it; however at the end of year you will be graded fairly based on your answers in the test”. Unfortunately, such agreement with students below age 18 predictably fails. First, many students seem unable to spend 45 minutes in silence. Second, students react differently to a possibility of bad grades at the beginning of the year (in far mode) and at the end of the year (in near mode), so even if they would agree at the beginning, they would feel cheated in the end. This could be fixed by giving a short test at the beginning of each lesson, and then allowing the opportunity to read a book only to those who passed a test, but the students who failed the test would still be bored during the lesson. Also, for those who didn’t try it, group negotiation is really hard. (It’s like playing a Prisonners’ Dilemma against 20 players simultaneously, but if 1 or 2 of them defect, you lose your payoff in all outcome matrices. For example if 18 students are silent and 2 are noisy, there is a noise in the whole room.)
I’m not sure that status explains this adequately, but from the inside it felt as least as much as that I wanted to feel as though I wasn’t of intractably low status rather than that I was trying to get higher status.
I know. A big part of the “teenage rebellion” is an evolutionary pressure to rise up from what is percieved as a bottom of the social ladder. And our society does not handle it well—it does not provide teenagers enough meaningful ways to rise their status in a nondestructive way. My guess is that teenagers who already get their status from somewhere else (are respected by their families or are successful in some hobby) don’t need to rebel in the classroom, but the remaining ones don’t have much choice, or even skills to use the few existing options.
Unfortunately, this is not something a teacher can fix during 45 minutes, while also providing the necessary information on the subject. Perhaps if I had 5 lessons a week, I could sacrifice one, but I was teaching 1 lesson a week, so I didn’t have this option. In theory, a form teacher should do this. In reality, either they don’t try enough, or they try and fail (and I don’t blame them for either, because the work requirements are simply unrealistic).
These days, I do understand that teachers are human beings. However, thanks for the idea that teachers are expected to have “magic”, and that this is unreasonable.
I’ve heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don’t know whether those claims are true.
If it’s any consolation, I only disrupted classes less than a dozen times, possibly less than half a dozen.
One of the questions I asked in those informal surveys was what the respondents liked about school, and the answer was always something about being social and never about learning things, even though the school was probably academically better than most.
I’ve heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don’t know whether those claims are true.
I don’t know either. Most examples come from movies, and fictional evidence is unreliable. In the movies the teachers are often doing risky things which succeed only by a good luck, and a different result could bring them serious trouble. Also the solution (in movies) seems to be that students strongly care about something; the teacher notices it and shows that he cares too; initially students don’t believe him, but later it causes a conflict between the teacher and other authorities and he pays a cost of signalling; and this makes students love him. -- Maybe I am generalizing here too much from a very small sample of two or three movies. (Also “he”, because in my sample the teacher was always male.) -- In real life I consider this very unlikely. There is no single cause uniting all students, ready to be discovered and utilized (not even playing flash games online, though that one comes closest).
Some teachers have the kind of personality that makes them very dominant in some classes, but in my experience it does not work at all classes. Different things make impression on students of different age and background. Seems to me that for younger students being a parent or grandparent figure works great. For students near 18 being physically attractive and irradiating success works great. If there is a group of students that care about the subject, knowing the subject deeply works great—this last example is most politically correct and most widely known, but is very rare in the real life, because most students don’t care, even many of those who signal that they care.
However, even assuming that some exceptional people have this right kind of personality that works for everyone, problem is we need thousands and thousands of people in teaching positions.
I’m a high school student. I ask a lot of questions in classes, especially math and discussion-based classes like “Science and Religion”. In math, this is an unwillingness to miss something and to back to it later—if I fail to understand one part of a lesson, it makes understanding the other parts hard. In “science and religion”, I ask loaded questions that disrupt the class by turning it into a complicated debate between me and the teacher. This is because I have little respect for the (boring) subject matter, believe I’m smarter than the teacher, and would rather entertain myself and my classmates by defeating the teacher in battles of wits than sit with a book and listen to the teacher explain that god’s existence is inherently un-investigatable.
TLDR: I ask questions to improve my understanding; I disrupt class because I’m arrogant and competitive.
In a classroom setting I sometimes have the opposite problem. I sometimes forget I am in a social situation entirely and think no more of stating something in a huge room of students than simply thinking it within my own mind.
So there’s one answer for you, obliviousness and impulsivety.
I was “that guy” through most of my undergraduate career, and the answer is that verbally sparring with the instructor over the material was the only way I could learn it. (Also, as Incorrect notes, impulsivity.)
I spent most of my life absolutely not understanding why a person would ask questions out loud in a classroom setting, with extra lack-of-understanding for people who disrupt classes with objections to the teacher’s content or style.
Eventually I was able to understand, through a lengthy conversation with different individuals having different points of view on the topic, that I have an unusually sensitive fear of public punishment and aversion to authority, probably ingrained in me by some specific classroom events of my childhood.
I am paying to learn about something from someone who knows more about it than me. If I need something clarified I’m going to ask.
It depends. There is a difference between disruption with a goal to get more information, and a disruption for the sake of disruption. Some people disrupt classes because they don’t pay for them (state or parents pay), because they don’t care about the lesson, and disrupting a lesson is a method of signalling high status and reducing the amount of transferred knowledge.
Disrupting someone’s lesson shows your high status against them (attacking someone with impunity) and against your classmates (you had the courage to do it first). This is why having one disruptive student per classroom is often manageable (they assert their status, and are happy with it), but having two or three is a disaster (it becomes a competition between them).
Reducing transferred knowledge makes sense if you can later bargain that you shouldn’t be examined for knowledge you did not receive during the lesson (thus by disrupting you reduce your necessary learning for exams); and it also reduces your competitive disadvantage against classmates who try to pay attention during the lesson (this last motive was explicitly explained to me by a few extra rude students).
I did private teaching, teaching at public schools, and teaching employees. The behavior depends on whether the person comes to the lesson willingly, whether they are interested in topic, and whether they are in the age interval 13-17 (when they get most status from their peers for destructive behavior).
I think you’re leaving out a category. My primary reason for asking questions or making comments during lectures is to signal high status (specifically, to show that I’m an unusually intelligent person who knows things that aren’t on the curriculum), but I’m not trying to be maliciously disruptive or hinder other people’s learning; rather, it’s somewhat gratifying, seemingly harmless, and most professors seem to like it (“class participation”).
I can remember enjoying disrupting classes by passing slambooks (informal surveys on paper—details available if anyone is interested). I didn’t do it for the sake of disruption—I was actually interested in the surveys, but I can remember the pleasure even if I don’t exactly feel it any more.
I hated school because it was boring. I didn’t exactly hate the teachers, but I didn’t have any concept that they might want to teach something.
I’m not sure that status explains this adequately, but from the inside it felt as least as much as that I wanted to feel as though I wasn’t of intractably low status rather than that I was trying to get higher status.
Back when I was in highschool, a friend and I were accidentally sorted into a general level course, when by rights we should have been put in an AP-level course. Neither of us ever really got anything out of the teacher’s lectures, and were able to ace the tests purely on knowledge gained from reading the textbook; consequently, we were bored out of our minds in class, and amused ourselves by competing to lure the teacher off on increasingly interesting and increasingly irrelevant tangents. A side result of this was that the other students, who actually needed a the hear the subject explained by a teacher, got shafted. I should note, however, that neither of us had any real animosity towards the teacher or the students—in fact, we absolutely adored the teacher; rather than being a malicious attempt to disrupt the class, we saw it as merely a friendly game between the two of us that happened to negatively effect other people’s learning of the material—a consequence that we were indifferent towards.
A setting where one person is required to explain something and maintain discipline, and twenty persons don’t care about the subject and are bored to death… is pretty much doomed to be frustrating for all participants.
Is there a solution? Seems like an official solution is that every teacher is supposed to have some unspecified magical power which solves the problem. Confessing that I don’t have this kind of power is very bad signalling in school, but I honestly don’t, and I suspect neither do others. There is also a collection of non-magical powers (such as speaking clearly, putting things into proper context, inserting a few jokes, being fair and friendly, using analogies and pictures when necessary, etc) which sometimes work, but because of their lack of magic, they also sometimes fail. More often if someone is determined to make them fail, and there is no credible threat to stop them.
How to fix it? One possibility is to make the lesson interesting to everyone. However, “interesting” is not an inherent property of the lesson, not even of the lesson+teacher configuration. (Many people fail to recognize this. They think there is a way to make the lesson inherently interesting, and a good teacher should be able to make it so.) A solution would be to make the lesson voluntary, but that is incompatible with the compulsory education.
Other possibility is to cope with the boredom rationally; accept that it exists, that to some degree it is inevitable, and just try to minimize harm. Again, admitting this openly is bad signalling (that is, if a teacher admits it). How exactly would the rational solution look like? My offer would be “you can do what you want, as long as you are silent and do not distract me or your classmates, for example read a book, and there will be no consequences for doing it; however at the end of year you will be graded fairly based on your answers in the test”. Unfortunately, such agreement with students below age 18 predictably fails. First, many students seem unable to spend 45 minutes in silence. Second, students react differently to a possibility of bad grades at the beginning of the year (in far mode) and at the end of the year (in near mode), so even if they would agree at the beginning, they would feel cheated in the end. This could be fixed by giving a short test at the beginning of each lesson, and then allowing the opportunity to read a book only to those who passed a test, but the students who failed the test would still be bored during the lesson. Also, for those who didn’t try it, group negotiation is really hard. (It’s like playing a Prisonners’ Dilemma against 20 players simultaneously, but if 1 or 2 of them defect, you lose your payoff in all outcome matrices. For example if 18 students are silent and 2 are noisy, there is a noise in the whole room.)
I know. A big part of the “teenage rebellion” is an evolutionary pressure to rise up from what is percieved as a bottom of the social ladder. And our society does not handle it well—it does not provide teenagers enough meaningful ways to rise their status in a nondestructive way. My guess is that teenagers who already get their status from somewhere else (are respected by their families or are successful in some hobby) don’t need to rebel in the classroom, but the remaining ones don’t have much choice, or even skills to use the few existing options.
Unfortunately, this is not something a teacher can fix during 45 minutes, while also providing the necessary information on the subject. Perhaps if I had 5 lessons a week, I could sacrifice one, but I was teaching 1 lesson a week, so I didn’t have this option. In theory, a form teacher should do this. In reality, either they don’t try enough, or they try and fail (and I don’t blame them for either, because the work requirements are simply unrealistic).
These days, I do understand that teachers are human beings. However, thanks for the idea that teachers are expected to have “magic”, and that this is unreasonable.
I’ve heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don’t know whether those claims are true.
If it’s any consolation, I only disrupted classes less than a dozen times, possibly less than half a dozen.
One of the questions I asked in those informal surveys was what the respondents liked about school, and the answer was always something about being social and never about learning things, even though the school was probably academically better than most.
I don’t know either. Most examples come from movies, and fictional evidence is unreliable. In the movies the teachers are often doing risky things which succeed only by a good luck, and a different result could bring them serious trouble. Also the solution (in movies) seems to be that students strongly care about something; the teacher notices it and shows that he cares too; initially students don’t believe him, but later it causes a conflict between the teacher and other authorities and he pays a cost of signalling; and this makes students love him. -- Maybe I am generalizing here too much from a very small sample of two or three movies. (Also “he”, because in my sample the teacher was always male.) -- In real life I consider this very unlikely. There is no single cause uniting all students, ready to be discovered and utilized (not even playing flash games online, though that one comes closest).
Some teachers have the kind of personality that makes them very dominant in some classes, but in my experience it does not work at all classes. Different things make impression on students of different age and background. Seems to me that for younger students being a parent or grandparent figure works great. For students near 18 being physically attractive and irradiating success works great. If there is a group of students that care about the subject, knowing the subject deeply works great—this last example is most politically correct and most widely known, but is very rare in the real life, because most students don’t care, even many of those who signal that they care.
However, even assuming that some exceptional people have this right kind of personality that works for everyone, problem is we need thousands and thousands of people in teaching positions.
I’m a high school student. I ask a lot of questions in classes, especially math and discussion-based classes like “Science and Religion”. In math, this is an unwillingness to miss something and to back to it later—if I fail to understand one part of a lesson, it makes understanding the other parts hard. In “science and religion”, I ask loaded questions that disrupt the class by turning it into a complicated debate between me and the teacher. This is because I have little respect for the (boring) subject matter, believe I’m smarter than the teacher, and would rather entertain myself and my classmates by defeating the teacher in battles of wits than sit with a book and listen to the teacher explain that god’s existence is inherently un-investigatable.
TLDR: I ask questions to improve my understanding; I disrupt class because I’m arrogant and competitive.
In a classroom setting I sometimes have the opposite problem. I sometimes forget I am in a social situation entirely and think no more of stating something in a huge room of students than simply thinking it within my own mind.
So there’s one answer for you, obliviousness and impulsivety.
I was “that guy” through most of my undergraduate career, and the answer is that verbally sparring with the instructor over the material was the only way I could learn it. (Also, as Incorrect notes, impulsivity.)