Murphy's Teaching Laws

Murphy Laws Site - Teaching Laws

Time for a few chuckles at some obvious truisms...

Murphy's teaching laws

• The clock in the instructor's room will be wrong.
• Disaster will occur when visitors are in the room.
• A subject interesting to the teacher will bore students.
• The time a teacher takes in explaining is inversely proportional to the information retained by students.
• A meeting's length will be directly proportional to the boredom the speaker produces.
• Students who are doing better are credited with working harder. If children start to do poorly, the teacher will be blamed.
• The problem child will be a school board member's son.
• When the instructor is late, he will meet the principal in the hall.
• If the instructor is late and does not meet the principal, the instructor is late to the faculty meeting.
• New students come from schools that do not teach anything.
• Good students move away.
• When speaking to the school psychologist, the teacher will say: "weirdo" rather than "emotionally disturbed".
• The school board will make a better pay offer before the teacher's union negotiates.
• The instructor's study hall be the largest in several years.
• The administration will view the study hall as the teacher's preparation time.
• Clocks will run more quickly during free time.
• On a test day, at least 15% of the class will be absent
• If the instructor teaches art, the principal will be an ex-coach and will dislike art. If the instructor is a coach, the principal will be an ex-coach who took a winning team to the state.
• Murphy's Law ill go into effect at the beginning of an evaluation.
• Weiner's Law of Libraries
  There are no answers, only cross references.
• Laws of Class Scheduling
  
  1. If the course you wanted most has room for "n" students, you will be the "n+1" to apply.
  2. Class schedules are designed so that every student will waste maximum time between classes.
     Corollary: When you are occasionally able to schedule two classes in a row, they will be held in classrooms at opposite ends of the campus.
  3. A prerequisite for a desired course will be offered only during the semester following the desired course.
• Laws of Applied Terror
  1. When reviewing your notes before an exam, the most important ones will be illegible.
  2. The more studying you did for the exam, the less sure you are as to which answer they want
  3. Eighty percent of the final exam will be based on the one lecture you missed about the one book you didn't read.
  4. The night before the English history midterm, your Biology instructor will assign two hundred pages on planarian.
     Corollary: Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do except study for that instructor's course.
  5. If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book.
     Corollary: If you are given a take home exam, you will forget where you live.
     Corollary: If the test is online, you will forget your password
     The last corollary was sent by Feenyx
  6. At the end of the semester you will recall having enrolled in a course at the beginning of the semester--and never attending.
• First Law of Final Exams
  Pocket calculator batteries that have lasted all semester will fail during the math final.
  Corollary: If you bring extra batteries, they will be defective.
• Second Law of Final Exams
  In your toughest final, the most distractingly attractive student in class will sit next to you for the first time.