Fifteen Minutes: Lemon Sours and Tight Jeans: Techniques for Staying Awake in Lecture

As the hum of a vacuum cleaner lulls babies to sleep, a professor lecturing from a podium causes college students to drool with dreams. There's something about listening to the monotone of an educated person saying important things for an important test that makes them think it's nap time.

Some professors have acknowledged the lullaby power of their voices. Earlier this year, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civic Policy Thomas Scanlon demanded that his students, "Open all the windows! It's 90 degrees in here. I want a challenge! It would be too easy to make you all fall asleep in a room this warm."

Resourceful students, however, employ many successful self-alerting techniques. Pierced students admit to pulling on their body jewelry to give themselves wakening jolts of pain. Those without piercings resort to more primitive measures: "I like to take my pen and just poke it into my arm sometimes," boasts Phil H. Chan '03.

Others wear '80s pants so tight they can feel them. The pants force them to suck in their stomachs and sit straight, straight up all class period.

Any food that induces tears can also be helpful. Super-sour lemon candies pucker cheeks and make eyes round. Powdered seeds of rare, blistering Thai peppers can easily be concealed as a light red dust on the end of a pencil. An innocent chewing of the eraser will give the tongue a burning wake-up jolt that should last a good 15 minutes.

Julia S. Oh '03 recommends a less painful and more meditative approach: "Mindfulness. I really pay attention to just sitting there. How my chair feels. How the professor's voice goes up and down and how it rasps."

Finally, many students keep awake by establishing a powerful psychic relationship with their professor, generally one dominated by paranoia. "I always keep in mind that the professor is watching me," admits John Rodriguez '03. Sitting directly opposite the professor makes students feel as though they're engaged in a one-on-one conversation. Another student resorts to "spending a lot of time wondering what my professor would look like as a woman."

In the back of a dimmed astronomy room, then, when the professor's voice has turned into a droning Barry White blah blah blah, the secret to keeping your eyelids in their upright positions is filling up all of your senses with your own created stimuli. If you squeeze, massage and shock your body into awareness, your memories of college may be of lecture--rather than a cloudy recollection of your vacations to dreamland.

--N.O. Yuen