Symptoms and signs: breaks essential teacher-student axis by interacting with fellow student, and disrupts public discourse by opening a secondary discourse that is parasitic upon it.
Etiology: basic rebelliousness repressed but inadequately privatized by therapeutic ridicule; whispering student is still willing to brook professorial wrath by communicating with "friends," with whom s/he should by rights be competing.
Treatment: pedagorine (Apple-a-Day).
Prognosis: excellent. The partial privatization of rebellion that produces whispering is easily completed with careful application of pedagorine, and attraction to the professor typically carries other benefits as well, notably that of emulation.
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Copyright 1992 Doug Robinson and Bill Kaul