Playing it Cool in the Classroom (Or, How to Act Like You’re Not Bothered by a Returning Student with Whom You Have Beef)

 I ended up getting an extra class two weeks before the semester began, and some of the students I’d had before were surprised to see me back in the classroom. “Is this History of Psychology,” said someone whom I’ll call Leah. “It is,” I said. Leah asked if I was going to be the professor. I said that I was, and I thought about apologizing.

 

Leah and I have history, you see. I accused her of using AI to write her final essay during a previous class, which she owned up to. Her grade plummeted, but not to complete failure. It would have been awkward to have to see her again for the same class. I hadn’t considered seeing her for a different class.

 

Given how I had only had two weeks to prepare, I organized the course around nondirective teaching. This means that students and I choose the learning goals and activities during the first week. I was rather impressed by the skills students focused on—such as general knowledge of all areas in psychology and comfort discussing its main systems (behaviorism, psychoanalysis, etc.). 

 

Throughout the first meeting I was pretending to scan the faces equally, but I was consciously avoiding Leah. Towards the end of the day, I asked about any course policies students wanted to see. Leah raised her hand. “Open-mindedness,” she said. “Okay,” I said, typing that into our working syllabus. “Students should be, like, respectful?” I asked. “And professor,” she added. “Like, I know that sometimes, like last semester for example, some people made other people uncomfortable.”

 

I nodded sympathetically, but I was feeling anything but sympathetic. I assumed that Leah was talking about something that happened on the second day of class when one of her classmates, I’ll call her Ms. Irate, stormed out of class and threatened to report me. That story is here. (https://www.patrickmwhitehead.com/2026/01/i-had-student-storm-out-of-classroom.html)

 

As we were wrapping up the policies section, I asked if we needed an AI policy. “I think we all know not to use AI to do our work by now,” said another student. I desperately wanted to say, “You would think.”