At the beginning of every semester, there is always a certain sense of dread about the first day of classes. For whatever reason, people are nervous because their teachers may be the complete opposite of what they had prepared themselves for. For me, this is an experience I am all too familiar with.

The website www.ratemyprofessor.com is a very handy tool to a number of students for many reasons. It gives them the chance to map out the semester according to comments from other students who have already taken a particular professor. I’m not too sure about my past and present classmates, but I know, for me, there have been several times I wished I had taken another teacher because the posts I had read online were not true. There are the times, however, that I am dead on with my choice. Thanks to the website, the teachers I picked turn out to be really exciting, amazing people.

This spring I decided to try something different and, when I was registering, I decided not to visit the website. I figured I would go with my gut and it turned out to be a really great idea. It’s the third week of school now and teachers are getting warmed up to us as are we to them. Some educators go about it better than others, but it’s no easy task learning about sixty to a hundred names in one day.

 I grew up in a family of teachers so I know at the end of the day, students are all just faces to them. There are grades, homework assignments, PowerPoints to make and quizzes to open on Blackboard. The stress put on a teacher can be burdensome at times and a majority of it may come from us as students.

One of the things I look for when selecting a professor is organization. A majority of the negative comments I read online are about disorganization and how the teacher doesn’t use Blackboard to keep track of grades.

Another thing I look for is the teacher’s classroom presence. It really annoys me when teachers embark on random tangents. In my opinion, digression from the curriculum seems to be a sweeping epidemic.

Teachers never mean to start talking about their personal lives or what is hot in the news, but when they do, I’ve noticed it can go two ways. Either this can be beneficial or a huge waste of valuable class time. When it starts to waste time in class, you know it’s going to be a long semester.

I will admit that every so often these tangents do show the sign of a good teacher. For some teachers it shows that they have an imaginative and driven mind and that they are willing to connect the classroom material with the real world.

When it comes down to picking a teacher, there will always be a certain feeling of uncertainty. No matter what any website says, there is no absolute way to know if a teacher is going to be able to connect to you until you take them. Know what you’re looking for and be informed about the classes you’re taking in order to have a more satisfying college experience.