This week is being spent in the joyous, soul-feeding activity of “conferencing” (Verb! Bah!) with my whippersnappers as they write and revise their essays. The process ranges between two extremes: my reading their full drafts and offering suggestions on their use of citations, on the one hand, and on the other hand, my sitting there while they wordlessly thrust a rumpled bit of notebook paper at me and I try to make sense of the delusional, serial-killer-style, chicken-scratch notes on it and they grunt indistinctly in the background.
(Bitchy Aside: It is my firm belief that there is absolutely no excuse, save a physical disability, for bad handwriting. Write fucking legibly, or use a fucking computer. End of Bitchy Aside.)
Today, during one of my meetings, my office phone rang and I decided to take the call. As you may imagine this led me into a whole nother (as we say in grammar) world of hurt. It was one of my students, and if I can make one generalization about them beyond the scope of their writing abilities it is this: they do not know how to ask for someone on the phone. It’s all “Uh, um, yes, hello. Is this, uh, that is, may I, uh, are you, uh, Mrs. The, uh, Vogue?” Before they are halfway through their poetic-pathetic hemming and hawing, I have usually recognized the voice and am all “UM, UH, YESTHISISSHE!”
This time it was one of my freshmen asking me how to get to my office, which is in the biggest academic building on campus — the VERY SAME BUILDING WHERE OUR CLASS MEETS — in a clearly demarcated room, the initial digit of whose number corresponds to the floor on which it can be found. You know, just like every other fucking numbered room in every other fucking public building in the country. Room number starts with a nine? WELCOME TO THE NINTH FUCKING FLOOR, ASSHOLE.
So I explained this politely and succinctly, all “take the elevator to the ninth floor, blahdy blah,” and when I hung up, the sophomore student who I’d been talking to when the phone rang looked at me with astonishment and started giggling. I was sure she was going to make some crack about freshmen not knowing their way around, or about how much of an idiot a person has to be to need directions to the ninth floor of a building — “Enter the building. Start going up!” — or other such humorous banter, but oh no was I wrong. She stares at me, all giggly, and blurts out, “Whoa, like, how did that phone just ring?!”
Is ugly handwriting okay so long as it’s legible? I block print pretty much everything because my cursive is abysmal owing to a dominant hand injury during my formative years.
Is there no end to the amusement to be had at the expensive of people who somehow escaped from high school without learning, for example, how buildings work?
Also, I think you should decision their papers after you conference them, perhaps including also a brief period of amourization. Just a thought.
I bet the student who needed directions also hit the elevator button multiple times because, you know, it makes it move faster.
How did you get my students this semester? It all sounds too familiar. I’ve simply stopped keeping office hours (unless I have to hold conferences) to alleviate some of my angst.
sho - jeez wahta niave kid. u gota hit it harder.
Ok, I think my brain is actually denying the stupidity of giggle-girl. Does she actually not know how a phone rings, or just how that phone rings, or was she making some comment on the improbability of the phone actually ringing during your conference with her? Or was she just stoned? I’m puzzled.