Coping with Seven Disruptive Personality Types in the Classroom

oThe Paranoid StudentCharacteristicsOur next subject is the paranoid personality style. Students who exhibit this personality styletend to be highly suspicious of others. They are likely to level unfounded accusations ofwrongdoing against their instructors, and they are given to feeling persecuted and unfairlypicked on.They can be, to use a nonclinical term, nuisances who blame their own limitations andfailures on other people, such as when they fail a test or do poorly on a paper and then faulttheir instructors for being incompetent. Many instructors report how such students willharass them with constant emails or phone calls, making unreasonable demands forattention and special treatment while usually including some backhanded accusatoryremarks about the instructor’s alleged deficiencies.Many instructors find it very difficult to set reasonable limits with such students. Theysometimes find themselves bending over backward to accommodate unreasonable demands,often out of a sense of fear or guilt. Unfortunately, an instructor’s excessive tolerance for thisform of misconduct often makes matters worse, because students with a paranoidpersonality style usually feel vindicated and emboldened when their instructors are cowedinto submission by their excessive demands. It might be helpful at this point to keep in mindthat even paranoiacs have real enemies, and part of the reason may be because they can behighly obnoxious and offensive.Here is a helpful anecdote that relates to how instructors may deal effectively with this typeof student. An administrator in a group home for male adolescents had to meet regularlywith the parents of a rather severely disturbed boy. They held scheduled monthly meetingsto keep abreast of their son’s adjustment in the group home. Right from the get-go, theparents used these meetings to berate the administrator with criticisms about the quality ofcare in the group home. Most of their early criticisms were noticeably about picayunishmatters, such as the assortment of fruit kept in the refrigerator. Each month, theadministrator regarded their criticisms as legitimate and did his utmost to fulfill theirrequests for improvement.Their demands quickly escalated, however, and over the course of the next few months theseparents were clobbering him with impossible-to-fulfill demands. At wit’s end, the administratorfinally consulted the agency’s psychiatric consultant, related the problem to him, divulged thathe was fed up with these harassing and ungrateful parents, and asked for advice.26