How I decided students don't hate me as much as they sometimes appear to

Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself

This is part of a series of posts I’m writing about the college professor life and my impending exit from academia, called Forever First-Year. Check out more posts here and subscribe to follow along.

I have an assignment I use in my classes in which students are responsible for leading discussion. My students call it “teaching the class,” which is pretty cute.

I started doing this assignment because I want my students to understand that we are all co-creators of our educational experience. There’s only so much I can do to make a class enjoyable and, therefore, a good environment for learning. Yes, let me just state at the outset that I believe we learn better if we’re also enjoying ourselves. It’s revolutionary, I know.

Inevitably, there’s a moment that comes as the student is standing at the front of the classroom, getting ready to “teach the class.” They’re staring out at their classmates—at their often bored or indifferent faces. They’re silently (or sometimes not silently) begging for them to say something…anything, when they turn to me in a panic. “You’ re really asking me to do this?” their wide eyes seems to say.

“Yes,” I say. “Being up here at the front of the classroom isn’t easy, is it?”

It is hard to look out at the faces of their classmates. I know because I do it every day. Some of those faces look only mildly bored. A few are actively making eye contact and a rare student might actually be nodding at you or, god forbid, smiling. God bless those beautiful human beings.

A few students have facial expressions that go well beyond boredom and straight into outright hostility, much like the girl in the classroom scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, her eye twitching with hatred at Ben Stein, which in retrospect, he probably deserved. Remember that girl? She isn’t just bored by Ben Stein. She actively despises him.

Yeah, this face.

As the person standing at the front of the classroom, every now and then you get a student whose face looks like that. Like they might, in fact, hate you. Or if I’m generous and feeling particularly high levels of self esteem, I can tell myself their face just looks like they’re in pain. They don’t hate me. It’s just that the experience of being in my class is physically excruciating for them. Is that better or worse? I have no idea.

If I meet every class over the course of a semester (this is a very big ‘if’) and each class lasts its scheduled 70 minutes (also unlikely), I’ll spend 2,940 minutes staring at that student who hates me (or is physically pained by my class). That’s almost 50 hours. Shit, can that math be right? What the hell am I doing with my life?

Okay, existential crisis aside, 50 hours staring at the face of at least one student who hates you is sort of intense. Like, maybe I should get hazard pay for that or at least free therapy. Imagine, as is often the case, that it’s more than one student who looks like sitting in my class is the most miserable experience they’ve encountered in their 18-22 years of life. No number of smiling and nodding students can really cancel out those I-hate-this-class students. And that’s not accounting for all the other students who have neutral faces, but still spend most of their time staring at their phones or their computer screens or out the window.

Yes, friends, this is what strikes terror into the hearts of my students when they stand up in front of the class and it is a bittersweet sort of revenge.

Do some students genuinely hate my class? Yes? Probably? Maybe? In my course evaluations, the negative comments are usually less about hating the class and more about insisting that I myself hate men or white people or rich people or, if they’ve absorbed what I’ve taught them about intersectionality, rich, white, male people. These comments are par for the course when you’re teaching about gender inequality and racial inequality and social class inequality. Just to be 100% clear, I do not hate men or white people or rich people or rich, white, male people. I do hate systems of inequality. This is sort of the whole point of sociology—it’s not about individuals, it’s about systems! But it’s not a point my students always master.

Here's the thing about those students who look like my class causes them physical pain. The semester inevitably ends (for some classes, this ending is the best part of the job). Those students are free to go and find classes that do not cause them physical pain. The only class I teach that is even vaguely required is introduction to sociology. Even so, you can fulfill that requirement with any number of classes that are less physically painful and much less likely to make you think about inequality. No one’s forcing them to sit in my class, but maybe, for the sake of argument, it was the only class that fit into their schedule.

The semester ends and I assume I will never see those students with suffering in their eyes again. They have absolutely no reason to ever take a class from me again. Except, next semester, there they are, in a totally different class that is in no way required. There they are in one of my classes which they freely chose, with no coercion whatsoever.

What. The. Hell.

The first time this happened, I shrugged it off. Maybe there just weren’t any other classes open? Then it happened again. And again. I began to wonder what exactly was going on. Had I accumulated particularly bad karma? Was I some sort of magnet for masochists? Was there a conspiracy of students working together to drive me inexorably into madness?¹

These students who return for another semester of misery often turn out to be some of my best students. They’re interested. Engaged. Enthusiastic about the discipline, even, though it still doesn’t really show on their actual faces.

After several years of this phenomenon, I had a realization. I turned to my husband, the lucky audience to all my best revelations, and said, “Oh, they just have really bad affect.”

It’s their faces, dummy! This is a realization I should have come to much sooner given that my best friend in high school once said to me, “Your face when you’re walking down the hallways looks sort of like you hate everyone.” To be fair, I sort of did hate everyone. Still, no one ever had to explain to me what ‘resting bitch face’ means. I understood it on a deep, intuitive level.

I should have known, then, that some number of those students who appeared to be in pain while they were in my classroom weren’t really in agony. That was just their face and mostly they had no idea that this was the affect they were giving off. I know because, very subtly, I’ve asked them.

“You know, you looked like you really didn’t like intro,” I’ll say.

“Oh, no,” they’ll answer. “I loved it.”

This lesson—that you do not know what’s going on inside someone’s head based on the expression on their face—is one of the most important things I’ve learned. It certainly helps in the classroom. On those days when I look out and the whole room seems to be filled with squinting, homicidal faces, I remind myself, I have no idea what’s really going on inside their heads. Maybe their stomach hurts. Maybe they’re having bad cramps. Maybe they believe they failed an exam in their previous class.² Maybe their face just looks like that all the time. I don’t know and it’s best not to assume. Or rather, it’s best to assume that whatever’s happening with their faces, it’s not about me.

In fact, this is a specific example of one of the most important over-arching lessons I’ve learned in my life—it’s hardly ever about you. Almost never. No one’s thinking about you. No one’s re-hashing the conversation you just had with them. No one’s wondering why you wore that shirt with the stain on it. No one’s wishing you would drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of the class so they can escape this torture. Truly, they just don’t care. The world is so very indifferent to you, which is both a disappointment and a gift.

Everywhere you look in your life, there are people who appear to be annoyed. They’re annoyed with you or the world. They ignore you or speak in a less than friendly tone. If you’re like me, maybe you’ve had one of those days when you encounter so many of these people that you start to wonder, “Does everyone hate me?”

With a few rare exceptions, the answer is no. Everyone does not hate you. In fact, probably no one hates you. It’s not about you at all. That’s just how they look or how they talk or the sort of vibe they’re in today. Also, there’s a small chance that not only do they not hate you, they think you’re sort of awesome. Awesome enough to sign up for yet another class with you.

Or maybe not, but the point is, you don’t know for sure. Once I realized that some percentage of those students who looked like they hated me actually liked me, I decided to just assume that about all of them. Or at the very least, to assume nothing. I decided to admit that this was yet another thing I just didn’t know, another one of those mysteries of life. Why does that student look so pissed off all the time? I don’t know, but why not go ahead and assume the best?

Check out my three favorite reads of 2023 at Shepherd.com, a great site for finding your next read with lots of cool lists written by authors and this new feature, favorite reads.

I thought my book events were done for the year, but then the amazing folks at Viewpoint Books in Columbus, Indiana, got in touch and now I’ll be there for their Cider Sunday event on December 17th, from 1-4. I’ll be signing books that would make the perfect gift for the sporty people in your lives or people who are interested in gender or race or LGBTQ+ issues and all those things that make students say I hate rich, white men.

1. This is a running joke in our house. There’s a line, I think in the introduction to Virigina Woolf’s collected diaries. Her nephew describes a dental procedure, after which his famous aunt, “descended inexorably into madness.” Well, I understand better now how a dental procedure could push you into madness. But there’s something irresistible about Clive Bell’s phrasing that leads my husband and I to constantly be on the lookout for one of us to descend inexorably into madness.

2. They’re not worried that they failed an exam in my class. I don’t give exams. I don’t do them because, first, they’re not fun, either to take or to grade. And, two, I don’t think they’re a particularly effective way of measuring learning, if that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.