Not Losing Any Sleep Over Missing The Lecture

I’ve been a college professor for a long time now, and I am used to students sleeping in class, or catching a quick nap in a corner, but this one takes the cake.

The classroom for my 8:00 am class was in the library building. Being a library, there were various comfy reading chairs around. I came into my classroom to start setting up for a lecture to find that a random student had shoved two of these chairs together in the back of the room to make a bed and was fast asleep on them. I figured that he would wake up once my students started coming in, so I went on with my setup, making no effort to be quiet, but not being overly loud, either. 

My first couple of students came in. I greeted them as usual. They looked questioningly at the sleeper in the back. I shrugged, “He was here when I got here.” They shrugged back, and we went on preparing for class. By 8:00 am all 30 of my students had arrived and this guy was still snoring in the back. The whole lot of us were sort of giggling at how he could sleep through all the noise. Being of an experimental nature, I decided to start lecturing to see when he woke up.

A full 20 minutes into the lecture, this guy sat up, looking bleary-eyed and tousled, and looked around in confusion. I smiled brightly and said, “Hi! Don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a class going on here. Think you can go sleep somewhere else?” He looked confused for another second, and then staggered to his feet, grabbed his backpack, and stumbled out of the room, still half out of it. This was the point at which the entire class burst out laughing, collectively wondering what the heck had just happened. 

I mean, I know lectures can be boring, but to be dead to the world asleep before I even get in the door?