Is having your hand in your pocket during a presentation bad?
If you want a short and binary answer, it is likely yes — keeping a hand in a pocket during the presentation is not the best habit, because:
- You lose yourself a chance to use that hand for communicating with the audience via gestures.
- Your body language and posture is more likely to be perceived as you can't be bothered with what you are doing.
Having said that, there may be examples of excellent use of almost anything which is normally not recommended in a presentation, if you plan for it and do it consciously. For example, if you ask your students the famous Bilbo's question: "What have I got in my pocket?" — and put your hand in your pocket, your gesture is playing nicely with your explicit voice communication to create an interesting and intriguing setting.
A binary answer to your second question is likely no — students acted inappropriately by interrupting the presenter and commenting on the presentation style, rather than topic of the presentation. Unless, of course, the whole aim of the exercise was to receive comments about the presentation skills and strategies. From your question, we cannot tell.
Hand in pocket can mean a number of disparate things, depending:
- I am a cool person;
- I do not care/I am better than you;
- I do not know where to put my hand and am embarrassed letting it hang around (check out Merkel's famous Hand Triangle as an alternative strategy).
Depending on presenter type and assuming it's not 2., it is perfectly fine to put the hand into the pocket. I have never seen anything berated for this, and in my opinion the foreign student was totally out of line. I thus assume the presenter belongs to group 3, because if they were 1, i.e. the cool guy, they would have found the words to put the heckler in their spot; and if 2, being heckled would not have bothered them in the least (I assume via the question that they were bothered).
Maybe it's a cultural thing, but the heckler was the foreign person and thus should have been doubly careful to berate someone on unfamiliar turf.
That being said, hand in pocket may come across as haughty or snobbish, and is thus not usually recommended in presentations, unless one is really sure that it sends the right relaxed and comfortable attitude (aiming to induce similar relaxed attitude in the listeners).
This may be a cultural thing. But not something I've heard of.
I've been told that in Europe (or parts), at the table you keep both hands above the table. In the US, you keep the left (non primary) hand below the table. I doubt that these old "rules" are widely observed most places, but they might be in some. My mother would have slapped my hand if I tried to use my left hand with a fork to bring something to my mouth. You could hold the fork in the left if you were cutting with a knife, but then had to put down the knife and switch the fork to the right hand. Everyone in England is now laughing.
Yes, the reason for keeping both hands above the table is that putting one below can be considered rude. People wonder what you are doing with that hand, anyway. I leave it to your imagination. Maybe the same imagination has led to the situation described by the OP.
But if you know about cultural taboos, you can observe them, or suffer ridicule or worse. Give presentations naturally, of course, and put the audience at ease.
I think that the fact that the university is in US is likely not relevant. We have students from all over the world, and often they cluster in some classes. For example, I've had classes of about 30 where ten or so were from parts of the former USSR. They grew up with different cultural norms, as did many of the other students.