Never ask a professor if you missed anything important when you were absent. This is a surefire way to lose bonus points with your instructor.
When it comes to interactions with students, professors all have their pet peeves. (For me, it was students who turned in papers without staples. Grr, it makes me cringe just to think about those papers with crinkled edges! But I digress.) One of the things students do that drives professors crazy is to ask the following after missing a class:
"Hey, did I miss anything important today?"
Why do professors hate this? Well, some of them get ticked off because they're on a bit of an ego trip. They want to believe everything they do is important, and the inference that some of the things in their class might be deemed as unimportant is maddening.
But even for professors who aren't on a major ego trip (and yes, believe it or not, most professors really aren't egomaniacs), it's annoying to hear someone ask, 'Did I miss anything important today?" The majority of professors really do put a great deal of effort into creating meaningful classes. The last thing they want to do is waste students' time with information or activities that isn't important. To suggest to a professor that a whole class period's worth of information might be deemed unimportant discounts this effort.
Appropriately sarcastic responses to this question might be:
"No, I just spurted out random useless information that won't be on the test, as always."
"No, class wasn't the same without you there, so we just sat around and moped."
Here's a few other things you should never say to a professor.
