I'm a confusion barometer

Yesterday I was sitting in my Structural Equation Modeling class, and I was having trouble understanding the concept the professor was teaching. It wasn't just me, either. Everyone was having trouble following along. The professor is a really smart, higher-level math kind of person, and all of us students are just regular-level math kind of people.

So anyway, he kept going and going and everybody was totally lost. Occasionally, he would pause briefly and say things like, "Does that make sense?" Or, "Is everybody following me here?" Of course the answer is, "No, not at all." But hardly anyone is ever willing to say something like that. When he asks these questions, he almost always looks directly at me. I usually ask a lot of questions in class, and I don't mind speaking up when I don't understand something, so I think he sees me as the class's confusion barometer.

That being said, I don't always immediately chime in when I don't understand something, because I like to wait and see if things get a little clearer as class goes forward and the lecture develops. Yesterday, class got about 2/3s of the way through, and it was clear at that point that I wasn't going to get it at all. Just as I was thinking this, the professor again stopped, looked directly at me, and said, "Does everyone understand what I'm saying?" He shielded his eyes from the light of the projector as he stared at me.

Me: If I was going to be totally honest...

Him: Yes...

Me: Do you remember earlier when you said "good morning"?

Him: Yes...

Me: That was the last thing I understood.

The class erupted in laughter. And not just a little bit, it took a few moments for things to calm down again. When they did, the professor (who also thought it was funny) tried to reframe things. But I think I threw him off his game, and even though he tried to simplify things further, class kind of deteriorated from there.

I saw him in the hall later and he told me he was glad that I'd spoken up. I think that means he's going to try and re-format the lecture for us dummies, which means that we get to spend another 50 minutes on Monday talking about the algorithms and matrix algebra that underlie the fit indices procedures used for testing structural equation models. Oh good.