Adjunct College Professor: Keeping Students Amused One Semester At A Time!

One of my chief loves in life is teaching. As such I am a faculty adjunct professor teaching at the undergraduate level at a local community college.

Usually teaching in the criminal justice administration and political science departments I found myself confronting kids during the day classes and a mix between young and adult learners in the evening classes.

Inevitably after the introductions the student body wants to know as much about their instructors as possible. They want to evaluate if you are going to be too hard on them or if you are a "softy" and they can wrangle out a good grade for little work and participation. The bolder of the student body will often just come out and bluntly ask what your predilection is.

To balance the two my syllabi's always require a paper to be completed using American Psychological Association (APA) format to cite sources from. During a particular semester a student would constantly giggle and writhe when I would query the class about their collective progress with the required paper and if anyone was having problems with the required format for citation.

At long last this particular student came to me in private and whispered to me (as if to shield me from embarrassment) if I knew that I was in a criminal justice and not a psychology class.

I didn't know how to respond to her until moments had passed and it struck me that she thought that I had been improperly placed by the college and was in the wrong class; in short she thought that I was a psychology professor teaching criminal justice.

I had to laugh out loud and then excused myself and told her that it was "ok" and then uncovered the source of her confusion as being the adherence to the APA format. I explained that the APA format was one commonly used in the social sciences. The student then hinted that others in the class thought it was funny that they thought that I did not know I was teaching in the wrong class. I told her that I was glad that I amused them.

During the next class I made a public announcement and reassured the students that I was teaching criminal justice and that the APA requirement was a standard for the paper only.

It was then that I realized that I would never rise to the coolness level of Harrison Ford's character of archaeology professor Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. So it goes ...