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To be a good teacher/instructor/trainer you have to have thick skin. That is for sure.
The students are looking for weaknesses and self-doubt so they can exploit it. If they see you sweat, they got you. They will use every trick in the book to get the upper hand in the classroom.
One of the ways the students will try to get the upper hand is they will laugh at you. Not with you, but at you. It may be as simple as a smirk or a forced smile. Or a chuckle. Or in some cases just out and out laughter. Then they will see if it unnerves you. Do you lose your cool and show weakness due to being laughed at? Then you're dead in the students' eyes.
I am convinced the fear of being laughed at in class by the students is one of the main reasons why so many teachers/instructors and trainers are boring. They need to be taken seriously and as a result, they won't let their guard down. They remain serious, formal and keep it to the facts in the textbook. Formality is the best approach in their eye. Because if they try to be interesting and entertaining, they may be laughed at.
I think teachers need to have a sense of humor. If you take yourself too seriously, the students may try to unbalance you. My big fail this year was not being aware of the "Hell challenge." My students had a great time at my expense. I just let it slide and chalked it up to experience.
One of my high school English teachers, who is also a minister and remains a friend, was a genuinely funny, personable guy. As far as being poked fun at, you have to let it roll off your back.
In my experience, the best, most effective, and most loved, respected teachers had awesome senses of humor.
Learning can be fun. Teachers can make learning fun. Part of fun is having a sense of humor. And yes, sometimes that means students laugh at teachers. How the teachers react is key -- do they also learn to laugh at themselves (always a valuable trait), or do they become defensive?
It is one thing for the students to laugh with the teacher/instructor and a completely different thing for the students to laugh at them to fluster the teacher or gain some type of control.
It is one thing for the students to laugh with the teacher/instructor and a completely different thing for the students to laugh at them to fluster the teacher or gain some type of control.
This is a good point. Also, when you start to build community through group exercises (which can sometimes break up destructive cliques) that can help, as well. I'm back in the classroom on a very limited basis this summer. These are much, much different students from the ones I had in the 1980s. My problem is the short attention spans. I'll start a thread on it one of these days.
To the OP: I hope you notice that most of the responses are basically positive, as opposed to your post which is extremely negative. The question is -- why the difference?
I think back to my student teaching in science, when there was also a student teacher in English. We had exactly the same students in exactly the same groups (they moved class by class together). I had a great student teaching experience. He flamed out and never became a teacher at all; in fact literally just walked out of the school one day never to return. The difference was not in the kids, the difference was in the two student teachers standing in the front of the room. After the student teacher quit, I talked to a small group of students who were the main issue, and one (you'd laugh if I could tell you his last name) looked at me and actually said, "It's our job to weed out the weak ones." Kids can be cruel, but I think sometimes they see right through all the bull----.
There is only one girl who has laughed at me, but she has such emotional trauma in her life that I know it isn't me. She also picked fights, was rude to other teachers, and was pregnant by the end of the year. So, there ya go.
I can't imagine having kids laugh at me, rudely, on purpose, on any kind of regular basis.
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