Behind Enemy Lines Your passion for learning makes me gag

Author: Andrey Tolstoy

Class participation is war by other means. When shooting for that 5-15 percent, keep in mind that you are leading a two-front campaign, in which the class participant par excellence will strike a harmonious balance between his two strategic objectives: earning the sympathy of the professor and avoiding alienation from his peers. Too often, one is sacrificed for the other, particularly in favor of the first objective. This is a grave error, and if you are guilty of committing it, your best advice is to keep reading. In no particular order, I present to you an arbitrary number of commandments.

1. Two words for freshmen: cool it. Hundreds of fascinating tidbits about your Febmester? Inane musings on the subject? Irrelevant personal commentary? Keep it to yourself. Once a sophomore, you'll observe the new flock of first-years, and you'll know to listen not to your wide-eyed inner child, but to the callous geezer now in its place.

2. If, in the course of the 30 minutes that you've had your hand raised, the point you were going to make has been made by someone else, under no circumstances should you continue to insist on speaking. Furthermore, if the professor takes pity on your strained body and responds to your signals for attention, prefacing your comment with "I was going to say the same thing" and proceeding to say that very same thing makes it triply redundant - and an unbearable waste of time.

3. Some professors try to keep the atmosphere of their class light by cracking a joke every once in a while. Few of these are zingers - usually due to the generational gap between them and their students - and the professors' subsequent self-deprecation is usually of greater hilarity. In some unfortunate classrooms, the pleasure is interrupted regularly by the apple-shiner who thinks it's a great idea to chuckle at any comedic undertaking by his instructor. This behavior is not only tactless, but also transparent to everyone but the offender. Recognize.

4. If I ever get a say in legal matters, my first decision will be to make uses of "like," "I mean," "I feel," "I don't know," "I was just going to say," and other diarrheal verbiage crimes against humanity. The offenders' sentences will be read to them in their own parlance: "This court was just going to say that, like