They think if they ask, they'll receive.

My students' exam is scheduled for 3:15 this afternoon. At around 11:00 this morning, a student came to my office and asked if she could take her exam at a later date. She wasn't sick. Her grandmother hadn't died last night or this morning. Nothing. She just wanted extra time to study. Needless to say, I denied that request.

And, of course, she asked me the chapters that the exam--in 4 hours--was going to be covering. I do not see this going well for her.

A classic.

This is a question that every professor gets multiple times each semester but it never fails to piss me off and amuse me at the same time.

An e-mail from a student on Wednesday said, "I need to leave for home on Thursday morning if possible, and I would miss class that afternoon. I wanted to make sure I would not miss anything too important during class. I have arranged to get the notes I will miss from a student already. However, if I am going to miss anything major in class, I will have to stay. "

Now, this is phrased slightly more nicely than the typical, but all professors love the "Am I going to miss anything important" question. No, we do nothing important in class ever. You should be fine. Take off the rest of the semester.

Stuff people eat

One day in my Personality Psychology class, I was talking about culture. I was talking about different foods that people from different cultures eat. So, I solicited from them examples of foods that they found strange in other cultures or foods that they knew people from other cultures found strange here.

A student, very seriously, raised her hand and said, "Well, when I was in France, I ate veal."

Okay, maybe you're thinking she was making some "it's alarming that people would promote the horrible treatment of calves" argument? No.

And they wonder why they fail

A student came to my office and asked me if he could retake a class of mine in the fall. He said, "Would it be a problem if I signed up for your class but had another class scheduled at the same time?"

Sounds like a joke. But it's not.

There are no stupid questions, only stupid people.

Students ask great questions. And by "great," I mean that they give me a lot to make fun of to my colleagues and friends. In all fairness, most students ask decent questions. However, it's the students who ask ridiculous questions that are most annoying in class and most entertaining out of class.

Here are two gems:

"Sometimes my leg goes completely numb, why is that?" Keep in mind, I am a psychology professor and this was asked in a psychology class. I guess I could have launched into some Freudian mumbo-jumbo about how the id was likely angry at his leg and the ego, in a protective maneuver, made the leg go numb so that the id would forget about it?

Talking about treatments for depression in class one day, I was describing the herbal remedy St. John's Wort (which has been shown to have some positive effects on people with depression). A student raises her hand and says, "Is that like aspirin?"

Yes, it's exactly like aspirin. That's why it has a different name, different use, and completely different chemical make-up.