"Eh......calm down there"

more annoying if a friend does this though definitely (probably something they're not that bothered about?)

This has happened to me over the years in a few of my IT subjects, where I've felt that what's being taught is wrong, or slightly awry, or not 100% correct. When I'd make amends, or question what's being taught, I'd get these looks from classmates that were a mixture of "Why the hell do you care?" to "You are such a show-off, dork."

Only a few were genuinely interested in the ideas I was contributing, and they were generally those actually interested in the subjects themselvse. To those other pompous people I say "eat a dick, motherfucker".

I had a chemistry teacher who used to turn purple and explode if some one would ask, 'Is this in the Sylabus?'. most memorably when he chose to read a descriptive passage by Dickens, (could be wrong about the author), about steel making.

Students and teachers seem to be so geared to passing exams and meeting targets that they have forgotten about teaching and learning (other than by wrote).

Also I kind of feel whenever I argue about anything I want to pretend I amn't thinking of some musical analogy in my head and then I go "say you had a BOOK" and all the people are thinking "you mean CD really, we know".
Haha! Fuck 'em, it's an analogy ergo it doesn't matter what you use, as long as it fits.

I tend to talk quite a bit in class; my defence against resentment is to try and make as many jokey asides (especially self-deprecating ones) as possible when I'm putting forward an idea or challenging the teacher, as it reminds all the other students that I'm just a dumbass like they are and they relax. In fact it in one of my classes it actually seemed to encourage a lot of people to open up and be vocal themselves for the rest of the semester, which I must say I'm a bit proud of.

That said If someone has a question about clarifying something the lecturer says I will happily join in and try and add my understanding to it - a fresh perspective helps. I guess it's down to your lecturers view on it as well - if they welcome it (as mine do) then fine. If - in Rick's case - the bloke is some sort of attention seeker I would soon turn off.

The thing I'm most puzzled about is the complete silence whenever a lecturer asks something like "Has [other leecturer] been though [subject we've covered about a bazillion times] with you?". I think it's a rote learning thing where unless a topic is described using exactly the same name/terminology etc, no one realises what's being talked about.

1. The meeting: when the senior guy convening the meeting says 'are there any questions?' and there's always one or two fuckers with questions which are invariably relevant only to them and should just be raised privately, and everyone else is already bored stupid by the corporate pep talk and wants to get back and do their real actual jobs / catch up on ILE. The only acceptable question in general meetings is "How is this going to affect our pay?".

2. Training: This works exactly like your lectures except it's even more infuriating when everyone clams up or gives the 'oh shut up' look to someone asking questions cos the stuff you're being told generally has an actual immediate impact on what you're doing. I used to train people quite a lot and would always ask OK, any questions, and everyone would just look shifty, and I thought 'you fuckers, the first time you actually have to do this you'll be on my phone all afternoon bleating cos you don't know how, just ask' - but they never did.

Alternatively asking "Any QUestions" before you've taught 'em anything is a good method of guaging how well they already know how to do it (ho ho).

There's this one girl in a few of my subjects who is just horribly socially inept. Not in the sense that she has no courage to talk to anyone, just that I rarely see her sitting with the same people, and whenever she's conversing with them she's always telling some story about how cool she is or some such. She suffers from that problem that some people have where they just over-over-over-articulate to the point where they sound like fucking twats. Sorry, but I have no sympathy for this girl. I've given up on sympathy all together.

Doing a course like mine (Engineering/Computer Science) you get a lot of nerd types who are really competitive. Many have these gigantuan chips on their shoulders, and think they know absolutely everything about everything. They're also completely socially retarded. (I'm aware that this isn't their fault, but it doesn't make them any less irritating) At the risk of sounding like some sort of huge egomaniac: I'm actually very above-average in terms of my technical knowledge, and when I come into a class and am a) able to answer many questions, make corrections, provoke discussion in what would be an otherwise dry subject, AND b) engage in well-rounded conversations with members of both sexes without giggling nervously, they get really defensive and scornful.

Do you think this is really occurring, or am I an egotist hell-bent on mounting evidence to support my own self-image? I'm pretty sure the above is a fair analysis of the situation. The whole social-ineptitude of so many classmates of mine is a bit depressing, because rarely can I ever introduce them to other friends of mine without extreme complications. (they just don't know what to say or do in social situations where they can't resort to technical subjects)

I totally empathise with RickyT here, actually if Kilian's reading I'm sure he'll agree that our classmate Ken is the man Ricky describes above, without a doubt.

Well yeah most of what we learn in school isn't going to help buy a car or whatever (especially in subjects like English and Latin and history), but if I HAVE to be there I'm going to at least be interested in what's going on instead of being like "can i go home yet PLEASE?"

And I was on mine. I asked far more questions than anyone else, and got into the kind of passionate debates Ronan talks about, except not very often as my course was Computer Science, so it was mostly only when a lecturer veered away on a tangent that I started to care.

Students and teachers seem to be so geared to passing exams and meeting targets that they have forgotten about teaching and learning (other than by wrote).

Obv this doesn't apply to college/university, but as far as sk00l is concerned, passing exams is indeed priority #1 for me and whatever I might happen to learn is just a bonus. Why shouldn't it be that way? I have my whole life to learn stuff, passing is much more urgent.

(That being said, whenever the discussion turns to anything that genuinley interests me, I do chime in enthsiastically, and yeah, I get those looks too. )

it is a very very fine line between the paying curious inquisitor and the selfobsessed braggart dickhead

and hey they're prolly the same thing at heart anyways

uh daniel of course it applies to university!

Yeah, I suppose, but with one major difference: in sk00l, I might be learning about physics or biology or other stuff which I have no interest in/do not think will help me in any way (not my case, thankfully, as one gets to choose one's area of expertise in 10th grade, bless the Portuguese sk00l system); when you're in uni, you're supposedly taking a course in something you're *interested* in, and in that case wouldn't good grades/passing exams come naturally whilst learning (as ppl absorb stuff they're interested in quite quickly and easily, whilst with stuff they don't really care about it's much more ardous process- which is why we opt to just memorize it and then instantly forget about it afterwards)

Bob, I think I know what you're talking about. In my Maths lectures last semester I became the person you're describing. Because of my poor eyesight, I was forced to sit up at the front, and thus whenever the lecturer was looking around for someone to answer a question it was always easy for me to just tell her. (as I didn't have to raise my voice or anything) It got to the point where she actually said to me (in a very quiet voice) "I know you know the answer, I'm just trying to see if the others don't!"

Bob, I had to restrain myself from that. I took to not putting my hand up or offering a contribution, waiting to see if anyone else had an answer first, before putting my hand a bit up, as subtly as possible. I was far ahead at the top of the class, and the teachers generally expected me to have an answer, so I didn't have to wave an arm.

Anyway, Ronan, here's what I think it is: passive lecture-listening is safe and doesn't require any pretense on the student's part -- you walk in admitting you're not up on the topic, you don't have opinions on it yet, and therefore nothing is expected of you beyond semi-interested comprehension of what the lecturer is saying. The sort of give and take you're describing requires that some students (you, in this case) actually have formed opinions on the topic that they're willing to explain and defend a little -- in other words, a little confidence that the opinions they're going in with are valid ones and that it's worth introducing them for discussion. Part of the negative reaction, I think, is that most students don't want their classes to shift in the direction where they actually might have to engage in that, which is sort of understandable: for some of them, the time for that is when writing essays and taking exams, and on a day-to-day basis they'd rather just absorb stuff and not have to be entirely on the ball with the critical thinking. If you rev the discussion up to that level, this sort of student finds himself frighteningly close to a discussion where he might be expected to have intelligent comments to make on-the-spot -- if not that, he at least finds himself in a position where he has to follow a complex back-and-forth of perpectives, which is a little more taxing than just absorbing what the qualified professional teacher has to say.

(That all sounds like I'm ragging on those students, but I'm really not: I imagine we've all had plenty of days in class when we had very different things on our mind (e.g. hangovers) and definitely didn't want to suddenly be in the middle of a nuanced and complex discussion.)