The prof overreacted, but he's still right

At Cornell University, a professor was in the middle of his lecture when a student in the audience of 200+ let out a loud yawn. The professor voices his displeasure at this act, and it all got caught on video:



What is sad is that Cornell is an upper-crust Ivy League university, and yet, it is obvious that even at the college level, instructors have to put up with the same sort of inconsiderate, infantile bullshit that I endure from my middle schoolers on a daily basis.

I too have been the victim of an intentionally loud yawn, and it always drives me crazy. What made me shake my head in disgust were all the comments on The Blaze blog (see my blogroll) where I first found this video in which the commenters did nothing but complain about the professor. I can say with much experience that unless you have stood at the front of a classroom on a regular basis and taught young people, you have no idea how frustrating it can be. And no, having logged years as a student when you were a kid doesn't count. There is a huge difference between being a student in the crowd, and being the teacher at the front of the room.

I totally empathized with this professor because I have truly been in his shoes. His one error was wasting his time trying to get the yawner to fess up or for the yawner's fellow students to rat him out. My only hope is that the rest of the students in the class who do know who the yawner is, took him to task afterward, away from the professor. After all, the yawner is wasting valuable time in a class that probably costs several thousand dollars of tuition. If I was a fellow student in that class, paying Cornell prices for my education, I would have socked yawning boy in the kisser, or got my ass kicked trying.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson