Zemblan Grammar

I have another nemesis. She is not obnoxious during class discussions, as My Nemesis 1.0 so often was, but she is, as I was telling a friend the other day, the human embodiment of everything that stodgy, professorial, adult-type-people like to complain about.

In spite of the attendance policy which forbids cell-phone use in class, and in spite of my pointed reminders to refer to said policy, she has sat at her desk, blatantly text-messaging by the cold blue light of her phone screen, at least four times. In spite of the (university-wide) email policy requiring students to use their university email accounts for school communication, she insists on emailing me from her hotmail account [sidebar: who even has a hotmail account?!], which causes the email server thingy to reject the messages and put them in my spam folder. My spam folder, incidentally, is full of thousands upon thousands of?wondrously cryptic mails?with subject lines like “sarsaparilla and silane,” “plowmen find the best casino barker,” “cecropia or belgian,” “dear good mood too u,” “privet friend,” and “test the sweets of the life yourself,” but, as much as I love coincidental poetry, I do not want to have to sift through that crap every time she emails me frantically (from the university account, this time) to tell me she sent me her assignment, like, totally FOUR DAYS AGO, and why haven’t I written her back to tell her I got it yet?!

Her best quality, by far, is her utter unwilingness to do anything for herself. She emailed me all in a panic the night before her presentation to tell me that she and her partner had talked about the book for thirty whole minutes, and would you believe they didn’t know what to do. Then, of course, she didn’t respond to my helpful email where I gave them oodles of ideas for approaching the book, never told me what her topic would be (part of the assignment is getting the topic approved) and never showed up to class, leaving her partner high and dry. It really just burns my toast when people do that — the dumped-on partner is always all, “um, so, I don’t know where Betty Sue is, but, um, I guess I can do the presentation by myself…um….” And if I were in the partner’s place, you know I would have to cut a bitch.

Her latest query regards her standing grade-wise, and she has asked me to tell her what grade she “has” currently so she can determine what she “needs to do” to pass. First of all, she doesn’t “have” any grade at all, since we are only partway through the term and all the assignments haven’t been completed yet. Second of all, she has the same damned syllabus everyone else has — you know, the one with the list of assignments and how they are weighted. She could just make her own damned self a damned spreadsheet if she wants to know so much. Hello, lady, it is called ALGEBRA.

Compared to the rest of my students this term, she is like that one retard in the lunch room who is always touching himself inappropriately while screaming and smearing mashed potatoes on his face.