Give Yourself a Hand

Apparently, when a professor finishes the last class of the semester here, we applaud. (Unless, of course, it's Professor CivPro and he keeps taking questions for 45 minutes after the end of class time until all but about 12 out of 60 people have trickled out the back.) I guess this is common practice at most law schools and has already been discussed at length by a better man than I, so I won't get into it here.

But I'm told that all students at Mr. Jefferson's University clap for their instructors, whether that instructor is "the Mark McGwire of political analysts" or a lowly TA leading an eight-person discussion section of Statistics 110. This is not considered weird.

But I've thought about it, and while it most certainly is weird, it's harmless enough. At least the professors are there to appreciate it. It's certainly better than when the teachers in elementary school showed movies because they didn't feel like teaching the day before a vacation. As soon as the credits hit, most of the kids would start clapping away, as if the late director of The Cat From Outer Space was going to crawl out of his grave, drag himself to the school, and pop out from behind the rolling TV/VCR stand to take a bow before hitting us with an encore.