It is a wonderful thing to sit in the last row during a lecture, when you are student and are not interested in listening to the lecture or answering questions by the teacher or both. It is also convenient if you want to go to sleep without being caught at it. If the classroom has a back door too, which is not locked after the lecture starts, one can run away more easily from the last row than from the first few rows.
I know all this because I have been a student before I qualified and became a teacher. Knowing the condition well, it becomes easier to find a solution to it. One way to deal with the situation is to just say:
“Hey, you all in the last two rows. Come up front. The first two rows are empty.” It works by the same mechanism of people doing your bidding at gunpoint. There is no happiness in it, for the people I mean. There is a better method. Before you begin your lecture, you look at the back rows, crane your neck for getting a better view, and move your lips as if saying ‘can you hear me?’ If you cannot mime, you may speak the line softly, so that perhaps only those in the first row can hear you. But you must move your mouth sufficiently to make it appear that you are speaking quite loudly. All the students in the back row look at you blankly, because they cannot hear you anyway. Then you repeat performance, pointing at your lips first and then at them and then at your ears. They get at what you are saying, and promptly say:
“No, Sir.”
Then you point to the first two vacant rows and gesture for them to come forward and sit in those rows. They comply without feeling too bad about it. The students in the front rows understand your trick right away, but they cannot put the back benchers wise in time. By the time of your next lecture for them, everyone knows about your trick, but they occupy the front rows before you enter the class, because they understand that a teacher who can play that trick can have a few more tricks up his sleeve, and if not, he can always brandish the virtual gun.
