You've seen them in classes before. You know the ones I mean. The students that are desperate to show off their knowledge not only of the class they're in, but of life in general. I'm not talking about the (moderately) intelligent student who tends to talk more than others, if only because they're sick of sitting in a silent room waiting for anyone to answer the teacher's question so the class can move on. To some extent I can sympathize with this student - plagued with the feeling of being surrounded by a sea of brain-dead husks. Yet I don't sympathize with them enough to not enjoy the look of impatience and desperation on their faces.
No, I'm talking about the student who wants the teacher and the entire class to know how smart they are, and impress them with their insight and knowledge. The sad thing is they tend to be oblivious to the fact that they themselves are the only ones enjoying their performance. I've seen one student who would pause after every question to look around the room with this self-important smile on his face, eager for everyone to recognize his cleverness. Yet only he seemed to be unable to hear pockets of the room groan that the teacher had answered this exact question not moments before in the course of lecture.
Even better is the student who tries to start up a conversation with the professor in the middle of a crowded lecture hall on a topic with only the most tenuous connection to the subject at hand. I've heard of one particular freshman statistics class. The lecture was supposed to be about probability and basic counting rule, but it ground to a halt when one particular student determined that the discussion should shift toward cardinality and the various kinds of infinity, and then into calculus and analysis and other topics wholly unrelated to the class (at least at that level).
If you think this sort of student gets on my bad side, drives me up the wall, or fills me with untold rage, you're looking at it from the wrong point of view. Make no mistake, this student will never win points with me through these tactics. I have delighted in turning down requests for directed study or letters of recommendation, glorying in the looks of dejection on their faces as I tell these students that they were a disruption in my class and would get no favors from me. But even this is secondary to the misery they impart on their fellow classmates.
For one, the class is annoyed as the student wastes their time with wandering topics irrelevant to anything on the syllabus. Even better, since class is on a tight schedule, if not everything can be covered in lecture, I simply assume that the students can learn it on their own time. So even if it's not covered in class, that does not exempt the students from having to learn it for the exam. It's the misery that keeps magnifying as one student strives to stroke their own ego.
And so this semester I was happy to see one of these know-it-alls show up in my second semester calculus class. They wanted to talk about vectors when we talked about solids and surfaces of revolution. At the merest mention of infinite series, this student couldn't help but bring up Fourier series and open up that whole can of worms. The class was clearly turning on him, and he was blindly forging ahead with his self-importance. But then one day after he wasted a good ten minutes of class, I saw that imp of a girl pull him aside after class. After that day, he sat next to her, almost entirely quiet. It appeared they pass notes back and forth - her way of appeasing his need without disrupting class.
So now she is not only deflecting each effort for me to crush her mind and spirit, but she is working to improve the morale and atmosphere of the class in general. Unacceptable.
