Easy Ways to Make Your Students Despise You

Yesterday I was thinking back about all the annoying things my teachers or professors have done over the years. Most of the time my teachers were great, but every once in a while I’d get a professor that no one seemed to like, and below are a few reasons what that might have been. If you, too, wish to make your students despise you, just try following these simple tips.

Don’t give good explanations. One of the least important tasks a teacher has is to adequately explain the subject matter at hand so that his or her students will understand the concepts and actually learn something from the discussion. Good explanations should especially not be given on things like papers, tests, and other assignments. If you give a student a C-, don’t even think about providing the student with reasons why he got that C-. Don’t you dare tell him what he did wrong, how to make it right, or what can be done differently the next time around.

Be unorganized. Students can get a lot of slack for being unorganized. Sometimes students are simply lazy, but for many, not getting assignments turned in on time, turning in half-completed assignments, or skipping class to work on something for another comes down to a lack of organization. It can be equally as frustrating for students when professors aren’t organized. So, feel free to have missing or half-completed slides for a lecture Power Point, show up late for class because you were working on something else, and don’t hand back graded assignments in a reasonable amount of time. It’ll really rub your students the wrong way.

Be obvious about the fact that you are teaching a specific class for the first time…and have no idea what you’re doing. Students (or their parents) shell out a ton of cash to be sitting in a seat in front of you. They are paying for a good education and by golly, they expect to get one. Go ahead and admit that you are winging the course and tell you students something like “I don’t really care too much about this class and I didn’t want to spend my time preparing for it”.

Speak straight from your PowerPoint slides…that are filled with only text from the textbook. Don’t bring something new to the table during class meeting times, and be sure to just repeat the same old stuff that your students (should) have already read.

Have a half page syllabus, or no syllabus at all. For a class with assignments and deadlines, students might want to know what they’ll be doing in your class and what is required of them throughout the term. Failing to provide them with detailed information will only leave them unprepared and feeling clueless about what’s going on in your classroom. Perfect, right? Provide your students with anything but a comprehensive syllabus at the beginning of the semester, and be sure to not inform your class of any changes that are made along the way.

Don’t understand what is required in your own assignments. Do you think your assignments are challenging when your students find them simple? Do you assume the workload you’re assigning to your students is easy when in reality, it’s not? Or, maybe you’ve assigned things that you thought you covered in class, but didn’t? Talk about a great way to make your students despise you! It’s not like your students want to actually learn anything. And, after all, it’s not like they have other classes to focus on, too.

Have poorly written tests. Who doesn’t like studying for hours only to find themselves up against a test with questions that make little sense and answer choices that are confusing. Make sure you don’t put too much time into creating exams that ask questions that makes sense.

Don’t show up for office hours. Because students probably don’t like to hike across campus to ask for your help, then find that you aren’t there, you should probably just attend office hours only when you feel like it or if you have nothing better to do. And, if you’re not going to be at your office hours, make sure you keep these plans secret so your students can’t plan accordingly.

If you can master all of these things, your students will be unhappy with you in no time! Have any other tips to share? Please let us know in the comments!