After all those serious posts, I feel the need to share something really dumb I did in the classroom.
I am female. I am substantial. In particular, I have large breasts. This is relevant, you'll see.
I teach some very, very intro level science classes away from my home discipline. In one class, I use density dependent phenomena in biology as an example. My case study is Parus major, a small bird related to the Chickadee. Its common name in the UK is "Great Tit".
In previous years, I have been careful to use only the latin binomial name for this species, and thanks to the general low levels of knowledge of ornithology in the lecture room have never had a problem.
However, this year... this year, I accidentally used the common name. Whilst speaking of increasing numbers. And making an emphatic gesture with cupped hands at chest height. Which is where my own oversized natural endowments matter to the story...
One of the boys actually fell off his chair, he was trying so hard not to snigger out loud.
Bye bye credibility! Maybe I should change my blog-name here to Embarrassed Academic.
Anyone know a safer case study for density dependent population phenomena in biology which I can use next year?
Stick with Great Tits - there are thousands of us who managed to learn our biology, despite a few sophomoric (and we were indeed sophomores) titters on the side. Maybe just make the common name part of the joke as a pre-emptively, and chances are they might even remember it better ("there's only room for so many Great Tits in England!" is one way to remember carrying capacity).
ReplyDeleteBesides, we've all been there. Find me a prof who's never drawn a diagram that accidentally came out looking phallic, and I'll show you a prof who needs to loosen up.
And another thing - you wouldn't want to lecture about Parus *minor* would you? Where would be the fun in that?
I used to make it a point to say the name -- whether I was talking about great tits, blue tits, or coal tits -- and then urge them to get the sniggering out of their system, because I was going to be using those names a lot. Within about 5 minutes, the giggling was at a manageable level.
ReplyDeleteYou have never seen so much laugher in an undergraduate classroom as a lecture on Thailand's population control efforts.
ReplyDeleteTo this day I remember huge amounts of detail about it too.
When I was in grad school a prof was talking about Great Tits and he was really into what he was saying, but all that was on the overhead was "Great Tits." The class was very small and one by one everyone trying to hold it in made little snorts. The prof never understood and went on. When he finally uncovered the rest of the overhead we started paying attention again. Also, everything I draw on the board always looks like boobs or cock'n'balls...no matter what I do. I draw on the board, I help some students, I look up to the board and think, how did that happen?
ReplyDeleteI like Lori's approach, actually. Similar to the phrase 'cleavage' in geology.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it helps at all, but I wanted to share my "oh, dear" moment from a couple of semesters ago. I was talking about low rates of condom use in a particular country, despite high rates of education (as shown in surveys) of education about STDs and about the country's high rate of HIV.
One of my students said "Well, why don't people use them?"
"It's not as much fun."
I tried to recover by noting that this is what people IN the country say about condoms, but it was too late.
Now you know why, in astronomy classes, I tell my students that Sky & Telescope magazine stopped using the term, “naked eye,” because kids couldn’t look at their web page on naked eye astronomy because parental supervision software was flagging the word, “naked.” It shall now be called the “unaided eye.”
ReplyDeleteAnother astronomy term to avoid because it makes people giggle is “heavenly bodies.”
And then there’s the name of the 7th planet from the Sun. It is properly pronounced “you-RAN-us.” It isn’t “your-ANUS,” which no less than Carl Sagan noted seemingly every 9-year-old knows. It also isn’t “URINE-us,” which I find that seemingly every 9-year-old quickly figures out, and which every last one of them thinks they are the very first to figure out. I wish they’d listened to the discoverer, and let him name it “George” (after George III, an English king Americans sometimes know about).
It's totally going to be "George" to me from now on.
ReplyDeleteThe Great Tit. Lake Titicaca. Dick.
ReplyDeleteBeing able to read or say these words without giggling marks you as an adult.
See, in English there are just all kinds of bawdy things actually in the literature, so you soldier on through Shakespeare's jokes about cunts--his word, filtered through puns--and let 'em giggle.
ReplyDeleteI spent part of the year in between college and graduate school as a "teaching intern" (an arrangement brokered by a family friend) at a rather snooty girls' school in England. One of my tasks was teaching 11-year-olds, who not only laughed every time I pronounced "poem" with one syllable and threw spitballs, but seemed to take particular, sniggering pleasure in my occasional references to the small enclosed area off our classroom, which to them was a "cupboard," and to me a "closet." Turned out they'd only heard the word in the context of the phrase "come out of the. . ." -- and, well, they were 11, and it was, as girls' schools are sometimes wont to be (the same was true of my own US girls' high school), a pretty homophobic place (despite the fact that there were several gay or lesbian teachers, and, undoubtedly, students).
ReplyDeleteI'd love to teach in England again, but not 11-year-olds.
And I would have thought you would be safe saying "tit" there, Grumpy -- but I guess not? Or am I mis-remembering that you're in the UK?
Yes, I'm in the UK - up here in the north tit is definitely a word to avoid!
ReplyDeleteIt was teh combination of words and gestures that was so unintentionally embarrassing...
In chemistry we have
ReplyDeletebackside attack
Stiff bonds
Hatree Fock
Bond cleavage
Photo excitation
...
I could go on but there are kids around me now.
After many years' practice, I have found that I can discuss Classical Greek man-on-boy sexual practices without raising a single snigger. But that's because I'm actually talking about sex, which students take very seriously. If I were only talking about something that SOUNDED like sex they would be on the floor laughing.
ReplyDeleteI had a geology professor who intended to write "wet cont." on the board (cont. was an abbreviation for continent) but failed to completely close the 'o'. He never caught on to the reason for our giggling.
ReplyDeleteI teach Philip K Dick's 1968 novel _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ and spend time talking about "Dick's techniques" and other things Dick does that students find giggle-worthy. I don't mind. At least I know they're awake.
ReplyDeleteOne semester, with one particular section, it seemed that every week I drew or said something unfortunate. The grain silo . . . the Venn diagrams . . . the translation of the tribal name where I forgot to be clinical and was just as coarse as the original.
ReplyDeleteBest. Evaluations. Ever.
In statistics class "Roy's Largest Root" always made me smile...
ReplyDeleteThe Amazon ad on the side is offering to sell me "Behaviour of the Great Tit" by R. A. Hinde. At least this makes sense. For about a week now it's been trying to sell me a riding crop.
ReplyDeleteWhat a fun story to share...
ReplyDeleteReading anything about seafaring "seamen" is good for a bout of freshmen snickers. It goes away after a while, though. :o)
I once taught a design course. Each of the students had to submit drawings of what they worked on.
ReplyDeleteOne project in particular was hard for me to mark as I found it difficult to keep a straight face as the student had used an abbreviation that was unintentionally humorous. He abbreviated the term "ram assembly" to "ram ass." rather than, what I've often seen, "ram ass'y". Despite my advising him to change that on his final drawings, he insisted on using it.
I have enormous amounts of fun teaching hamster repro...I make numerous pre-emptive strikes regarding material which might elicit giggles, and this seems to surprise and amuse the masses.
ReplyDeleteI once taught a drafting service course in one department and I got into a situation one day similar to the original post.
ReplyDeleteThe topic was threaded fasteners and there's a standard notation used to give a proper description of the thread type, pitch, and diameter. I planned to use an example of how would specify a thread on a length of cylindrical material.
I had the impression that before my lecture, the class had finished a liquid lunch at a place across the street just off campus and were, therefore, in a less than serious frame of mind. I took it in stride and began my example by saying something like: "Suppose I have a 1 inch diameter shaft 5 inches long."
Several of the students, particularly a number of the women, started laughing. "Ooops! This isn't going be easy," I thought and rephrased the opening statement by using "rod" instead of "shaft". That didn't help and I'm sure some of the students were laughing so hard that they came close to falling out of their chairs. "I'm not going to come out of this one intact, am I?" I said to myself.
Somehow, I managed to blunder my way through the example but I'm not sure how many actually paid attention. It was a bit embarrassing, of course, but, on the whole, I didn't mind. Most of those students were a great bunch of people and I wished I'd had more of them.
My first shot at teaching Lysistrata, back in grad school: "Ancient Greek comedians wore costumes with an exaggerated phallus. Which, as you can probably tell, Aristophanes milked for all it was worth."
ReplyDeleteI hadn't even noticed I'd said it until one of my students helpfully noted on the in-class writing assignment, "Interesting turn of phrase, Ms. Porpentine."
Oh well. I like to think Aristophanes would have enjoyed it.
Trying to explain to my students, as a TA, why they would be well advised to attend lectures, as the professor was much more knowledgeable in the subject than was I: "The professor has a larger 'toolbox' . . . of concepts."
ReplyDeleteI teach a science fiction class where we do a whole unit on Dick and by the end, we are all giggled out. It takes a while though.
ReplyDeleteIn intro civil engineering class during fluid mechanics material one topic is about hydraulic head. So there's a lot of talking about head. There's also a lot of giggling. From a 90+% <19 yr old male audience.
ReplyDeleteA colleague of mine, a neurologist who studies birds, shows videos of tits in class--but he preempts the giggles by telling a story about how he once went to Barnes & Noble to find a book on his subject matter and, embarrassingly, asked the woman at the info desk, "Do you have British Tits?" She replied, "What's wrong with American ones?"
ReplyDeleteNo one giggled at "tits" after that because everyone knew that everyone else knew the joke. Sometimes it's best just to show the students that you "get it," ha ha, and then you can all go back to being adults.
Oh, goodness, I don't get to have nearly as much fun as all this, though I did have a student years ago who first asked me to explain why we would refer to adapters as "male" and "female" and then took offense at the reference and asked me to please use the proper technical terms instead.
ReplyDeleteAnd I must admit that I had to supress a giggle at the plumbing supplly store the other day, noticing that they had an entire aisle devoted to various types of nipples.