The Art of the Backbench

The backbenches have been the bane of peaceful classes, and their occupants crowd the same place in a teacher’s memory as the great outlaws of yore occupy boards in a sheriff’s office — finding one of these dreaded backbenchers out in the wild, was accompanied by a license to shoot. However, the backbenches are surprisingly good for even those interested in learning, thanks to a combination of trigonometry, acoustics and biomechanics.

Article by : Prabhat, definitely not a backbencher.

So what does a student actually need? A good view of the board, air circulation, good physical and mental health and acoustics. And the best place to ensure all of these? The backbenches.

Mental Health
As we all know, mental health is the least important part of an education, and hence I’m getting it out of the way right in the beginning. The backbenches provide an opportunity for you to chat with you friends, browse your phone, doodle, stare out of the window and indulge in other activities to ensure you remain sane through the long day. As long as you don’t speak too loudly, the teacher should be occupied with their prize audience in the front of the class.

Physical Health
This is another very unnecessary part of an education, but clamoring activists force me to include this as well. Sitting in the front benches warrants quick glances between a notebook and a blackboard — a complete nightmare for the neck muscles. And god forbid if the teacher enters story mode, and you must ensure eye-contact with them for the entirety. And god forbid if you’ve got the dreaded breed — a tall person — single handedly (head-edly? shoulder-edly?) capable of blocking the view of a good portion of the class. And god forbid if you’ve got a chair on the side of the class. And god forbid if you’ve got a particularly dusty chalk. God just has a lot of forbidding to do if you are in the front of the class.
Back benchers can easily avoid this — their vantage point allows them to make eye contact with a teacher and view the entirety of the board and their notes with minimal neck movement. If you are all the way at the back you can also lean back without disturbing people behind you, and wall seats allow for much better lumbar support.

Note: For further geometric proofs of the undisputable superiority of the backbenches, students have been assumed to be spheres.

Board views
Now ensuring this is an art. Needless to say, sitting in the front of the class often results in the teacher coming in the way of what they have written, necessitating precarious tilts and acrobatics to read their scrawls (apologies to teachers with beautiful handwritings). However, sitting in a backbench doesn’t guarantee the permanent viewing. If the teacher uses a projector, it’s best to sit in line with it. But if they use the board often, the best side is the same as their writing hand.
This is the result of years of experience and detailed experiments in a variety of classrooms, but solvable through simple… well angles. Anyone writing on the board leaves their writing side open, and if it’s a righty, their right side is open to viewing. However, viewing older notes is tricky as the teacher covers that eventually, but you still get a major advantage over the dreaded frontbenchers

Acoustics
These are particularly tricky. If a teacher directs a sentence to the wrong side of the class (or over your head), you’re in trouble. But, thanks the laws of reflection and science all sounds eventually reach the backbenchers — they hear everything (including stuff happening outside the class by that is unimportant).
Except for things told to the frontbenches. This is particularly bothersome, especially if it is an answer to a crucial question. But here is where the backbenchers contribute the most — to ask a question they must be loud, and the teacher is forced to shout their answer across the length of the class, thereby granting knowledge to everyone in the class, instead of concentrating it in the hands of the selfish few (apologies to my friends with loud voices, who ask questions aloud from the frontbenches, you guys are amazing, people who whisper questions, you know who you are).

The backbenchers are the true Robin Hoods of the classroom, helping distribute knowledge, saving the necks of the unfortunate few by granting them unrestricted views of the blackboard, and offering themselves as scapegoats for commotions in the class.

Backbenchers, we respect ye.