July 6, 2009

When I, the devoted husband, answered the phone and heard a hint of panic in the Mrs.’ voice, I was willing to go anywhere to help. I imagined myself called to a scene of imminent danger, one plagued by violence, to counter the effects of crime or accident. I steeled myself for a journey to the emergency room or an overgrown ditch beside some forgotten road.

Still, what I heard surprised me.

“I need you to come down here to the jewelry store right now,” the Mrs’. voice insisted. “Our daughter has shoved a bead up her nose and we can’t get it out.”

I grabbed my hat and rushed outside. My office is only a few blocks from the store and I booked it down Main Street like a man on a mission to save his baby from inhaling expensive gems. If I’d had a portable siren, I’d have strapped it to my head.

“I’ve called the doctor,” the Mrs. said as soon as I stepped through the shop door. “They’re going to fit her in as soon as we can get there.”

I reached out and took my beautiful, sweet, two-year-old daughter into my arms. She was smiling and acting as if nothing unusual had happened, proving she has not only the storage space, but also the unshakable nerves necessary for a career in jewel smuggling.

As we headed to the car, I said to the clerk, “After we have this dug out of her nose, we’ll make sure to get it back to you.”

 She looked a little befuddled. “No,” she said. “That’s all right.”

 On the way to the pediatrician, I heard the full story. 

When my wife’s grandmother died a couple of years ago, she left our daughter a box of plastic costume jewelry. On occasion, my wife has allowed our little one to play dress-up with some of great-grandma’s things.

One of the necklaces, a string of dark blue beads, had broken and the Mrs. had taken it to the jewelry store to have it fixed.

“She was sitting on the counter while I was talking,” the Mrs. said. “We heard her laughing and saw she had two beads stuck in her nose. We got one out, but she pushed the other one deeper in.” 

 I was instantly grateful she hadn’t been playing with a stack of $17,000 diamonds.

At this point, apparently, our neighborhood jeweler stepped in and attempted to solve the problem. I mean, he has a lot of experience removing jewels from small spaces, right?

As I have been told, he laid our daughter on the floor and peered up her tiny orifice using his loupe to get a good view of what was going on in there.

I can only imagine another customer, upon seeing this, would have been inclined, after purchasing a new brooch for mom, to ask if the owner didn’t have a minute to spare to determine what had been causing the earache that had been needling her for the last couple of days.

 “Well,” the jeweler said, issuing a final diagnosis, “I don’t think I ought to mess around with this.”

 The Mrs. agreed and called me.

At the doctor’s office, we were able to see her regular doctor, a round-faced boyish man whom our daughter has been seeing since birth. Dr. B is shy with a wonderful, comforting manner. On the day our daughter received her first vaccinations, the room was flooded with tears and cries of “No! No!” as soon as he entered with the needles. But, after a few minutes, thanks to his warm personality, Dr. B was able to get me calmed down.

This day, after inspecting the situation, he stepped out and returned to the room with a small plastic rod that, when attached to a small light, looked for all the world like a miniature light saber. I mean, if Luke Skywalker, in his effort to overthrow the dark Empire, had ever been called upon to extract a forty-year-old piece of cheap costume jewelry from the nose of a toddler, I feel sure this is what he would have used.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s an ear speculum,” Dr. B. said. “Normally, it’s used for getting out ear wax, but.…” He trailed off and shrugged as if to say, “Sometimes you just have to improvise.”

My daughter lay down on the examining table. She seemed to be thinking, “Hunh, so this is what happens when you cram jewelry up your nose. They take you to the doctor and everyone pays you a lot of attention. I bet I get a lollipop out of this.”

Dr. B. inserted the probe and after a couple quick flicks of his wrist the bead was lying on the outside of my baby’s face covered in, well, exactly what you’d expect a bead dug out of somebody’s nose to be covered in.

We all stared at it.

“I need to save that. I need to fix the necklace,” the Mrs. said to Dr. B., then added, “I mean, I’m going to wash it first.”

Dr. B. plucked the bead up with a piece of gauze, dropped it into what looked like a urine sample cup, and handed it to my wife.

On the way out, we asked our little Chud what the lesson of this experience had been.

“Don’t stick any beads up your nose,” she said.

 Indeed. A lesson that, sooner or later, we all must learn.

June 19, 2009

We live in a nice neighborhood. Except for the occasional incident in which one neighbor shoots another through the throat at close range with a high-powered deer rifle, it’s been quiet. 

To be fair, the shooting thing has only happened once in the three years we’ve lived here. But who knows? Maybe our neighborhood averages a shooting every four years. We could be due for another one.

The day after the violence, I was working at the local newspaper and was assigned to cover the story. I showed up at the house where the victim lived. Family members were abuzz with conversation out in the yard, which is understandable since that’s where they kept most of their furniture. If by “furniture” you mean the back seat from a 1997 Chevy mini-van.

I walked up to ask a few questions. Here I was, a member of the media, forcing my way in on them after a tragedy. The guy who would turn out to be the spokesman for the family eyed me a little suspiciously at first. The split ends of his stringy hair brushed his shoulders as he turned. The bristles of his moustache hopped as he opened his mouth to reveal gaps where his front teeth ought to have stood. He took a long drag on the cigarette he clenched in his rippling fist.

His eyes narrowed as he locked his gaze upon me and said, “You live right down the street, dontcha?”

Appearances to the contrary, they turned out to be a welcoming bunch, and surprisingly nonchalant about the proceedings of the previous evening. A member of their household lay in the intensive care unit after having had a large chunk of his airway ripped apart by a large caliber bullet, and his family’s attitude seemed to be, “Hey, why sweat the small stuff?”

The perp, they said, had claimed the shooting was an accident. Yeah, he was angry. Yeah, he knew the gun was loaded. Yeah, he pointed the barrel at his neighbor. Yeah, he pulled the trigger, but the whole thing was an accident in the way everything is an accident for certain people who’ve forgotten to take their meds. The victim lived, and as far as I know still bunks down, next door to the dude who shot him. Let no one say people in our neighborhood aren’t willing to let bygones be bygones.

Our neighborhood seen from the air would be a single loop set away from the main road with an inner and outer ring of houses. They are small and close together, built for working-class inhabitants. I love living there and every morning my heart swells when I step out of the house and look around.

Still, strange things happen.

Almost since we moved in, I have been mowing not just our front yard, but the adjoining yard of one of our next door neighbors. Lately, the job has gotten complicated.

You see, our neighbor is a nice enough guy, but his dog is wanted in six states. For murder.

Our neighbor keeps this Rottweiler in the backyard. Whenever I push the mower past the fence separating front yard from back, the dog hits it with the force of a spurned buffalo. The fence, built with all the structural integrity of a cheap kite, shudders along its length. Meanwhile the hound is barking in a way that indicates that on the day that fence falls he’s got an “accident” planned.

And I fully expect that dog to get free some day. In my imagination, I can see a long line of people missing limbs outside our neighbor’s door, demanding their arms and legs back, and my neighbor frantically tearing up his back yard with a shovel shouting, “Just a second, I’m sure they’re here somewhere!”

So I’ve just stopped mowing the half of his yard the dog can see. Since his own mower has been broken for years now, this leaves half his front yard nicely manicured and the other half looking like the set of “Platoon”.

The day before yesterday, we encountered another of these odd locals. Every summer, the local ice cream man comes tootling down our street. His big paneled truck roams around with pictures of cold, sweet treats plastered to its side. For a few quarters, the driver, Mark, will offer you heaven on a stick.

But Mark is not just an ice cream man; he is also a prophet of doom, though only part-time. In the winter months last year he wrote a book that purports to explain “why society has all these problems.”  I know this, because right there on the side of his truck, right next to the advertisement for “Rocket Pops”,which feature three jolly, fruity flavors, is the cover of his book. It features a mushroom cloud.

Talk to him for a few minutes, and he’ll be happy to tell you the extent to which society has fallen apart due, in part, to a rotten educational system. There are plenty of other causes too, for sure, but if you’re interested, you’ll have to flag him down and buy the book.

I avoided the subject when we stopped him earlier this week. I groped instead for something else to talk about.

“So,” I said, “you’ve been driving this truck for a long time?”

“Thirty-two years,” he said, smiling broadly from behind the lenses of his pizza-plate-sized glasses.

He started up the truck and pulled away. As he did, he flipped whatever switch started the music coming through the loudspeaker atop his vehicle. It seemed Mark had been playing the same cassette tape for his whole thirty-two years. The tune was cheerful but warped, distorted as if floating to us from a far-flung seasick circus band.

From now on, when we hear that sound coming down the street, and my daughter looks up and says, “What’s that, Daddy?”, I think I’m going to say, “Well, sweetie, I’m not sure, but it sounds like the Apocalypse.”

June 17, 2009

The compulsion continues. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how after becoming a father I began to see that adults everywhere are unable to prevent themselves from giving certain children or, in our case, a certain child, lollipops. Sometimes, these friendly, stick-bound candies turn up in the oddest places.

Many months ago, the Mrs., an avid consumer of household hints and tips, read somewhere about the process of making homemade vanilla extract. I’m not sure of all the details, but I know it involves a lot of liquor.

And a vanilla bean.  From what I can gather you let the raw bean bathe in a Ball jar full of vodka in a cabinet somewhere for half a year. If it doesn’t become vanilla extract, at least you’ll have a pleasant smelling way of igniting charcoal. 

Now that I’ve written about the vanilla making, I feel certain there must be more to the procedure but, really, such things are out of my domain.

We must have been running low because the Mrs. took it into her head to make some more of this concoction a few days ago. The vanilla bean she picked up at the local food co-op, one of those crunchy-hippie places that sell frozen flax seed pancakes and always smell like a blend of cardamom and patchouli. It’s a temple devoted to health and wholesome living. You can easily pick up a copy of Yoga Journal while waiting in line to pay for your carob bar with raisins and asparagus bits.

Given the co-op’s mission to promote health and vigor, they decline to deal much in cheap booze. For that, we had to shop elsewhere.

We live in what, in Kentucky, is called a moist county. No, it has nothing to do with the humidity.  Many counties in Kentucky are dry, meaning all alcohol sales are prohibited. Some are wet, meaning alcohol sales are permitted under normal legal limitations. We live in a county where alcohol can only be sold in restaurants of a certain size and whose main source of revenue is food sales. But, there is not a liquor store or straight-up bar within the county limits. 

The county just south of us is wet. Ten seconds south of the county line liquor stores start sprouting up like weeds after a week of rain. Coming home from visiting friends last weekend, we could see them up ahead, their garish yellow lights screaming “Last Chance! Last Chance!”

“I need to stop here,” the Mrs. said. “I need some vodka to make the vanilla.”

We pulled into the parking lot only to notice that acquiring what we needed would be so easy no one would even have to get out of the car. The store featured a disturbing innovation. It had a drive up window through which clerks were passing a steady stream of intoxicating brews to drivers.

We got in line. When it was our turn, the Mrs. rolled down her window and said, “I need the cheapest bottle of vodka you’ve got.”

“It’s for cooking,” she explained.

The clerk, bearded and bespectacled in a worn t-shirt that revealed a mess of less than elegant tattoos, mumbled about our options, which made it even more difficult to hear him over the racket created by all the metal in his facial piercings clanking together.

Somehow, the Mrs. selected her brand, and the clerk clomped off.

When he returned, he fixed his eyes on our two-year-old daughter strapped in her car seat in the back.

“Does that baby want a sucker?” he asked. His eyes sparked with excitement over the prospect of giving a child a lollipop.

“Uh, sure, she would love one,” the Mrs. said.

Leaning forward from the passenger seat, I asked a question that suddenly seemed pressing.

“Do you get a lot of children shopping here?”

No, the guy said, but sometimes parents bring children through the drive-up and he likes to be able to give them a treat.

Back at home I asked the Mrs. if it seemed odd to her that the liquor store would keep a stock of lollipops on hand.

“Well,” she said, “it keeps them coming back.”

“Yea,” I said, “just like alcoholism.”

June 15, 2009

Any weekend in which you wipe out an entire civilization with a household mini-vac is a memorable one, and I won’t soon forget what happened to me during the one that just ended.

Sunday morning as I sat at the dining room table, a perfect perch from which to check Facebook on the laptop while monitoring the Chud, I felt a peculiar itch on my forearm.

When I turned my arm over for visual inspection, I found an ant, a tiny one, frantically searching for a way off the strange, fleshy landscape onto which he’d wandered. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say he found a way off that was likely less pleasant than what he had hoped for.

Five minutes later, the itch had returned. Another ant was crawling across my arm, probably looking for his colleague with whom he was quickly reunited in ant heaven.

“Where are these things coming from?” I wondered, fearing I might already know the answer.

Our house has a tendency to be buggy. Spiders haunt our corners. Deciding their fate is a routine part of my husbandly duties. I am both gladiator and Caesar in the arachnid arena. Sometimes I let them live, carrying them wrapped in tissue outside to shake them free in the yard. Sometimes I crush them and flush away their creepy carcasses. 

Every summer we battle ants as well. When I got up to inspect the area around the dining room table Sunday, I found them streaming by the hundreds back and forth from some spot near the baseboard to the gap beneath the coat closet door, where we store, among other things, a big bag of dog food.  You might be unaware of the popularity of dry dog food among the ant population but, let me assure you, it’s huge.

As I stood watching this miniature army march in formation across the hardwood, two aspects of my personality, a tendency to panic and a deep-seated commitment to finding the path of least resistance, combined to create a perfect plan.

I sucked them up with the dustbuster. Their little bodies disappeared up its whirring snout like mobile homes in a twister. I could see the surprise on their little anty faces. I flung open the closet door, knowing speed was of the essence, and yanked out most everything stored on the floor. A battalion hid there; I went to work on them.

I left the vacuum’s motor running as I scurried outside to empty it, banging the pieces against the rim of our massive plastic trash can to rid them of their cargo.

Back inside, I found a few survivors. These, I beat to death with my bare hands, slapping the floor wildly.

The Chud walked over.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” she asked.

I did not want her to panic in the face of invasion.

“Nothing, Sweetheart,” I said. “I just found a few ants here and I’m getting rid of them before mommy comes to take us to church.”

The Chud, perplexed by the sound of my hands banging on the floor asked, “Are you hammering them out?”

Indeed I was. After a few moments, I seemed to have won. No more ants were in sight, save those whose wrecked bodies now littered the folds of my hands.

I went to the bathroom to wash away the carnage, returned to the scene and cleared the evidence of battle. I removed the remaining corpses with a whisk broom and dust pan.

When the Mrs. returned to drive us to church, not a single ant lingered.

When we came home a couple of hours later, I saw all my efforts had been in vain. In the intervening time, the bugs had rebuilt their operation.

It was my delicate bride who, upon returning from a beautiful service devoted to the worship of the Prince of Peace, broke out the weapons of mass destruction.

“I’ll get the spray,” she said.  “You get some paper towel and get ready to wipe up all the little bodies, that grosses me out.”

Ten seconds later chemical weapons had solved the problem. Our floor was a pool of poison and dead ants. I wiped vigorously.

Then, the house was quiet. Word seemed to have spread through the colony not to mess with the Abbott’s. We’ll see how long it lasts. I fear they will be back, that already in some tiny crack in the molding some small sentry lurks twitching his antennae just waiting until the coast is clear.

June 12, 2009

The other night the Mrs. and I went out and bought our little Chud her first bicycle, one covered with Disney princesses and sporting training wheels. The Chud was quite excited to see it also came with a water bottle. That’s to keep her cool on those long, grueling rides from one end of the driveway to the other.

I’m having a hard time accepting that my two-year-old now has her own means of independent transportation. I mean, theoretically, she could go all the way to California on this thing. A trip complicated, no doubt, by the fact that she is unable to work the pedals, but still, it could happen.

This kid loves her “bikissel”, even though it mostly serves as furniture right now. Instead of riding it around outside, she sits on it indoors and watches Max and Ruby, or just makes believe. The morning after we bought it, she got up from bed and ran to where it sat in the living room. She climbed onto the seat and said with a touch of melancholy, “I pretendin’ to drive ’cause I don’t know how to work my bikissel.”

She’d been obsessed with having one for months. I first noticed her interest last fall on a camping trip. Some little girl had a bicycle parked outside her family’s camper. Our Chud would cry out, whenever we passed it, “May I sit on that little baby bikissel?” Eventually, the Mrs. took her over to the bike and was granted permission from the owner for our daughter to sit on it. It was a big moment for such a little girl.

Since then, she has been declaring, often multiple times a day, “when I get a little bit older, I can have a bikisell!” Any occasion remotely related to two-wheeled transportation devices would serve to elicit this proclamation. If she saw a bicycle on television or someone riding one in the street, out she’d come with it. Even motorcycles would cause this response as she seems to be confused about the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle. I fear that she soon could be the only Hell’s Angel to turn up in Sturgis on a Disney princess bike.

After months of practicing this response to even the mere mention of bicycles, the other night when she overheard the Mrs. say, “Let’s go out tonight and buy her a bicycle,” she launched into her “when I get a little bit older” routine.

Always before we had responded by saying, “Yes, that’s right sweetheart, you can.”

This time I said, “No, you won’t get a bicycle when you get a little bit older.”

I wished instantly that I hadn’t said it. Her little face fell. She stared at me, confusion and hurt marking her face.

“Yes,” she said. “My mommy said I can.”

I tried to make it better by hurrying the punch line. I picked her up.

“No,” I said, “Not when you’re a little bit older. Today. Today is the day you get a bicycle.”

She seemed to get it. At least, no permanent damage was done. There didn’t seem to be any lingering pain.

At least not for her. I’m still struggling. From the moment she was born, I knew she was on a journey away from us. Each milestone we’ve passed in the last two years has been bittersweet. I still think of that newborn who couldn’t raise her head, couldn’t turn over, couldn’t talk.  With all the joy her growth has brought, each new development has been in the direction of independence, of autonomy, of leaving. I knew this would happen. I guess I just never expected her to have wheels to help her do it so soon.

June 10, 2009

While on vacation last week I logged onto the college’s Web site to check for last semester’s student evaluation results. They were there.

Before I comment on them, let me make a few disclaimers. First, I am fortunate to work in a place where I am surrounded by friendly, interesting colleagues who make being here a privilege. Second, the majority of students I work with are polite and appreciative, though not always hard-working. This is true even if my joking should make it seem otherwise. Finally, from what I’ve been told by other faculty who teach freshman general education classes, my evaluations are usually pretty good. So my distaste for them is not sour grapes.

I just tend to be skeptical of the opinions of teenagers. I’m never sure what it means when a young person, fresh from her small, Southern town thinks I’m awesome. It’s nice, I suppose, but I take it with the same boulder of salt I take student criticism.

Of course, the written remarks on the evaluations are rarely flattering. They serve instead as the last resort of the aggrieved student who fears speaking up about his concerns face-to-face. Anonymous student evaluations serve not as a means for teacher improvement, but as revenge for slackers.

There seems to be little students won’t complain about. Last year, a student complained about the gestures I use while lecturing. They are, according to this student, too big, over-the-top.

Clearly, this is a person who has never tried to keep a room of hung-over eighteen-year-olds awake and focused at 9 a.m.  Demure waves of the hand don’t cut it in those situations.

Comments on the evaluations are often unintentionally ironic. Take, for instance, the student from last semester who complained my course provided “no benefacial information.”  Well, it appears her spelling class was also not helpful.

One student this semester complained that I only wrote “needed more” on his speech evaluation forms. What this student didn’t seem to get is that I write “needed more” when a speech is so thin and frail there is nothing else to comment on. If I assign a ten-minute speech, and the student gives a speech that takes less time than he spent walking from his chair to the front of the room, I have nothing to say except, “You need more.”

Among  the oddest complaints I’ve had the last two semesters is that I have favorites. I have considered heading this accusation off by telling my classes that I do not have favorites and that, in fact, I dislike them all equally and I apologize if that is not obvious.

The problem is that wouldn’t be true. I feel real affection for even my most neglectful students.

But I can understand how some might think I have favorites. I do tend to favor students who come to class in a condition to engage me and the material. I take being awake as a leading indicator of being prepared to do this. It’s much easier for me to enjoy the personalities of those students who are conscious.

Here is a list of steps students can take to become one of my “favorites”: 1) Come to class. 2) Make a moderate effort at conquering the material. 3) Indicate somehow that you find me something more than an annoyance. That’s it. I may have favorites, but I am an equal-opportunity favoriter.

Often, the complaints have nothing to do with me. By far the most common complaint I get is that my course requires too much work. I get bad marks from students in my public speaking classes for, you know, requiring speeches. I can only assume that my marks would be higher if I required no speeches and no attendance, the two ingredients that, from many students’ perspective, make for a perfect course.

And that’s the rub. Professors and students often have divergent understandings of the purpose of a course, and student evaluations reflect the gulf between our views. So it’s hard to take seriously complaints from a recent high school grad who holds a view of education that, not to be too blunt, is completely wrong. 

Professors everywhere usually don’t do a good job of challenging students’ view of what college should be. The fact that students can spend so much time on our campuses and, even after graduating, not know the purpose of college or what it means to be educated is, I fear, a truer and more grave evaluation of our efforts.

June 8, 2009

And we’re back.

Not only have we returned, but my health seems to have as well. We spent most of the last two weeks visiting family out west.

Naturally, getting there and back meant flying eventually but our journey really began with an hour’s drive to a hotel near the airport where we spent the night before our departure since we’d been booked on a 6:10 am flight.

It was not a luxury stay; no fancy soaps, no beautiful linens, no flowers, no chocolates on the pillows. This place was all about the basics, two queen beds, a shower and cable. And germs.

My brain recognizes entering a hotel room as a signal to start sending out messages not to touch anything. Because these messages get issued with the strength of life and death imperatives, and because the whole purpose of hotel rooms is to ACTUALLY TOUCH THINGS, I never relax. I spend the night wondering who slept in this bed before me and how many people, exactly, have been murdered in this room. By the end of the night, I am always convinced the number is in excess of a million.

To cap off the joy of a sleepless night at Chez Filth, I awoke to find the car had a nearly flat tire.

While the Mrs. and the Chud waited for the taxi coming to pick us up since the hotel’s shuttle van was “broken,” I drove across the street to use the Speedway station’s air pump.

I dropped 75 cents into the machine and tried to fit the hose to our valve stem. Nothing doing. In fact, there was no hose tip, just a big plastic disc attached to the machine by yards of useless piping that I was left trying to screw onto a half-flat tire at 4:30 in the morning. I  surrendered the effort went into the gas station.

A flat-faced kid met me at the counter. I explained the situation. He stared at me with a look of surprise. His mouth hung open. A woman, probably the manager, said, “Yea, somebody cut our hose,” in a matter-of-fact-tone that suggested I was stupid for not seeing something so obvious.  I got my 75 cents back.

Back at the hotel, I parked our car in the lot where we were leaving it and began planning to return to an undriveable vehicle.

The cab came and we got to the airport where our two-year –old was treated to full “she might be a terrorist” treatment, including having the splint she was wearing to correct the injury to her arm she had sustained while playing in our room at Disease Inn dusted for traces of explosives.

At least the flights out  and back were uneventful. I did notice the airline, in an apparent attempt to generate revenue in the face of an economic downturn, had begun charging for many goods and services that were previously assumed to be included in the price of your ticket. For example, landing gear. Who knew that flying in a plane actually equipped to land required an expensive upgrade?

Once back on the ground, we returned to the lobby of the hotel where we left the car to wait for the AAA man to come change our now entirely deflated tire.  We got fortunate that he was friendly and professional, two qualities that, to say the least, are not always characteristic of AAA road service providers.

An hour and a half later, we finally pulled into our driveway. Home looked good. The Mrs. carried in our sleeping Chud to put her down in her own little crib as we too headed for our old familiar room for the first time in, well, way too long.

Published!

I am proud to announce that Small Town Living, an online magazine, has published one of my columns.

See it at:  http://www.stliving.net/ST_Living_June_July_09_2.pdf

Scroll down to page 50.

May 31,2009

I am travelling this week, and sick.  It seems I brought everything I needed for this trip except my immune system. Now, I don’t even remember where I might have left it.

Getting the kind of colds I get, the rough, knock you down kind, away from home is, if such a thing is  possible, even more miserable than catching one at home. At least at home, I can be miserable in familiar surroundings.

What happens is that I don’t sleep. The first nights of any trip are restless. I am in strange bed and my body, no matter how tired I am, will not relax.  Instead, my body stays awake and worries-about germs, about how the air quality is not right for comfortable sleeping.  Mostly though, my body stays awake worrying about not sleeping. I think my body may need some counseling.

I am putting my hope in zinc. I have been sucking those little lozenges,  the ones with just barely enough cherry flavoring to cover up the fact you are eating metal.  They’re supposed to help you recover more quickly. The family member who gave them to me  is a doctor.

“Is there any medical evidence, ” I asked,” to suggest these really work?”

“No,” she said. “But my mother swears by them.”

Well, at this point that’s good enough for me.

May 25, 2009

Part of the responsibility that comes with the power of being sovereign in the classroom is determining student grades. Passing out the occasional F is part of the job, an unpleasant part. Many professors, including me, will go to great lengths to avoid failing a student. Educators–at least the good ones–don’t go into this business because they enjoy seeing people fail.

But.

Once in a great while, a student comes along whose behavior is so insolent, so arrogant, so utterly dismissive of the welfare of his classmates, that he challenges even the most saintly professor not to take some joy in the justice of his failure.

I had one this time. My syllabus states that students are allowed to miss six classes. This student seems to have read this statement through a theory of literary interpretation so arcane only someone with the education and life experience of a college sophomore could comprehend it,  and concluded, “Hey, I only have to go to class six times!”

If he attended more than that, I’d be surprised. I took attendance once or twice a week. Even without taking attendance daily , I still recorded more than 15 absences for him. Our department policy states any student who misses more than 25 percent of a course cannot receive credit. So, naturally, the kid failed.

Did the shock of an F on his grade card humble him? Cause him to reflect on his deficiencies as a student, as a man? No, it did not. Instead, it provoked him to email me demanding to know why attending class was necessary at all.

Here is the text of his first email, excluding only his name.

I’m just wondering how it is possible that i failed the class, since all of my speech grades were above 80%. I fit had to do with my attendance then i would like to know why it was necessary that i come to class.

Clearly, this was written by a busy, busy man. So busy, in fact, that not only can he not spare the time to come to class, he can’t spare time for pleasantries like a salutation or proper capitalization.

His argument, as far as I can tell, is that a man who can’t spare the split second necessary to depress the shift key, can’t be expected to attend my class.

Not only did this kid seek to have me justify, after the fact, why he was required to come to class, he sought to go over my head, and wrote to the Dean. Upon learning, shockingly, that the college administration believes students ought to attend class, he wrote to me again.

 Here is an excerpt.

I understand that my attendance was the issue. I never recieved a warning report telling me to come to class, nor did you ever mention it to me. i also don’t understand why it was necessary for me to be there. I never recieved anything less than an 80% on any of my speeches, so obviously my understanding of how to give a speech, based on your
judgement, was above average. my attendance in class was not necessary tolearn the material, as evidenced by the grades i recieved. i do not understand why this is an issue. please explain.

Please explain. Pretty demanding for a kid who just failed his basic public speaking class.

Still, here’s my explanation. Perhaps, kid, perhaps the classroom experience is about more than you. Perhaps the goal of sitting in a room with other people and learning something, even if you think you know it already, is something other than maximizing your personal benefit.  Perhaps the reason you need to be there is to benefit others, to lend your presence to the mix of personalities in your class from which flows a character-shaping experience called education. By skipping every class session except those where you had assigned speeches to give, you cheated your classmates and broke the contract you made with me and everyone else in the room.

 So, you failed. You will have to repeat the class. See you next semester. If you show up.