- Day 3 Suit (Grey Birdseye Suit by Calvin Klein; Check Shirt by Gap; Check Bow Tie by Penguin)
Well, after learning a lesson on Wednesday, the week concluded in sweaty fashion. If this project fails and I give up and wear a polo shirt to teach, I am going to blame global warming. One of the two classes I'm teaching is in an un-air-conditioned computer lab and it probably pushes 90 during class. It's so hot that it's hard to focus or talk coherently (I think I told my students I was so hungry I might eat my textbook ... ). Anyway, the point of this digression is that teaching in a suit is much harder at a school that insists on starting classes in August.
More to the point, I've already started to notice a few differences during the first week of the project:
The first day I wore the suit on campus, I almost ran down a student outside of the HUB (our student union at PSU). I had needed to get some cash from the ATM and walked over between sections of my class. Unlike the usual jostling that happens when walking around campus during a class change, I found that people would actually move out of my way (not unlike this image). This was all well and good until someone moved to get out of my way when I thought they wouldn't and I narrowly avoided crashing into them. It turns out people get out of the way of a man in a suit.
Also, I've noticed that all my students make a point to come up and thank me after class on their way out the door. This may occur for other people, but it is novel for me. I've even had a few people shake my hand after lectures. One girl came up to introduce herself and explain that she was going to be missing a few classes because of athletic commitments. After explaining this and hearing from me that it was fine, she looked confused and stuck out her hand. I shook it and she left. It was fun to see that this suit project seems to be causing some kind of cognitive dissonance in my students. It seems that they know how to relate to people in suits (these are mostly Business majors, after all), and they know how to relate to professors, but these two behavior patterns are not the same.
We'll see how this develops next week.