I think I’m actually starting to develop an intense dislike of students. Never mind that I have been perpetually in school until last semester, and that most of my friends are still in college. I had at one point considered teaching as a career, but now that aspiration is looking much less appealing, even on the university level (not even considering K-12 public schools, yikes).

Last week I had a student come into the office, desperate for help. Being a non-native speaker of English, she needed assistance with her higher-level environmental history course. As it so happens, I have taken this course and enjoyed it immensely, so after casting about for a tutor and not finding anyone, I agreed to help her out.

Our first meeting was on Friday. She has a paper due tomorrow for the course, a paper about a passage from the writing of a famous female naturalist. The paper is to incorporate issues of gender as well as influences the woman’s education may have had on her writings.

“So, what influences do you think gender had on her writing?” I queried.

“Well,” the girl said, “She writes with a lot of details.”

“Uh huh?” I said, as she had just ended there.

“Well, I think women write with lots of detail, and men don’t write as much.”

I cringed. “Um, perhaps the professor is looking for a different level of gender analysis? How do you think her gender influenced the way she viewed nature?”

“She likes simple things in nature,” offered the student. “I think women, they like simple things, where men like things more complicated.”

Oh, boy.

“I also had a question about why she wrote about Gothic?” she pointed at a passage in which the author describes the landscape as Roman vs. Gothic in sensibility.

“Well, Gothic in this instance refers to architecture - have you talked about that yet in class?”

“No, I thought she meant the people that wear black…”

Yikes. How to begin to broach concepts like “gender essentialism” to a history major who associates Gothic with Hot Topic? The first meeting took a good three hours, and after explaining the article paragraph by paragraph, showing her how to analyze the text as opposed to making things up out of her ass, and offering tips on how to construct a paper with a thesis sentence, I was none too sure of how well she would fare on her own. Well, I thought, at least she’s making an effort to understand the reading. I can at least work with that much, right?

“Are you available to meet on Sunday, to go over your paper?” Yes, she was, and we planned a time and place. “9:00?” she offered, and I shook my head vehemently. “11:00, then,” she said, smiling, and I wrote directions on where we were to meet - a coffee shop on the corner of a prominent intersection, as well as my phone number in case she was lost. “See you at 11:00 on Sunday!” she beamed as she left me sitting at my desk, wondering what I had gotten myself into this time.

Today, at 11:00 sharp, I show up at the coffee place with my roommate in tow, who had some studying to do. We order food and eat, and by the time we finish, it is 11:30. I realize that I left her number at the office. No problem, I’ve come armed with knitting. At 11:45, I finally get a phone call: “So sorry! I thought the meeting was at 12:00!” - “No problem, just come as soon as you can, I’m still here.”

More waiting. It fast becomes 12:00, then 12:15. I give her a call, she doesn’t pick up. 12:20. I’ve had more cups of coffee than my caffeine sensitive system can really handle. My roommate says I ought not to stick around, and I agree. At 12:30, I call her again: “I cannot stick around all day and wait for you. In the future, if you are to meet with me, I would appreciate it if you made an effort to either be on time or call if you are late.” 12:45, she finally calls back and leaves a voice mail mentioning that she has arrived, but it’s okay if I left already if she is too late. No explanation as to why she is very, very late.

I still feel kind of guilty about the snippy message (I am never good at reprimanding people who deserve it), but honestly, the girl was over an hour and a half late. Even operating under the assumption that the appointment was at 12, she was still forty-five minutes late. She needed me, not the other way around. And I was doing the tutoring for free.

It really wasn’t too much of a waste of time for me, as I did enjoy getting out of the house with my roommate and making snippy comments about people walking by the coffee shop. For instance, one girl had elf ears. She wasn’t dressed like an elf otherwise, wearing a green sweatshirt and jeans, and then the elf ears. Later we spotted a frat-looking guy in shorts with words on the butt, and had a good laugh behind his back. Then there was crazy-pants woman, whose pants we kept seeing again and again after we left the shop. They were white not-quite-capris with red splashes on the front of one leg, and a blue panel on the back of the other leg, inset with white circles that had drawings on them. Those pants were ridiculous, and she was damned proud of them, so much so that she strutted back and forth on Mass St. with a sassy little hop to her step: “yeah, what about my pants? They’re HAUTE.” I love Lawrence.

Still, I had laundry to do, a cat bed to felt, and art supplies to purchase. I realize that this is what professors have to put up with all the time, students behaving as though they are the only person that’s got shit to do. I guess it’s a little easier to bear when one is paid to do so, but still unpleasant. On top of that, I still get students into the office who don’t know where their class is and want me to drop what I’m doing and look it up for them. Class has been in session for over a month now; where have these people been?

Am I just being harsh? Was I ever this painfully stupid? Maybe once we go back to the era of sharp rulers and dunce caps, will I consider teaching as a career again.

The other day, Simon and I got on the subject of high school days. All four of us, the boy, Simon, Paul and I, had attended the same program at the same high school, an International Baccalaureate school: the best college prep program in one of the worst public schools in the city. The school itself, though diverse, was very segregated: during lunch period, the black kids hung out on the first floor, the Latino kids camped out in the west complex, the special needs kids milled about the basement; us IB nerds were more or less stationed in two hallways on the second floor. Ignoring passing period, though, when about 900 kids tried to squeeze through the narrow hallway that connected the two buildings, it really felt as though we were in our own little neurotic PSAT-scores-obsessed, college boot camp.

This was by far the best education available in the area, economically and academically - prep school teaching at a public school price. But the IB environment, we both agreed, was highly toxic. The sheer amount of elitism radiating from our peers and our teachers was enough to cause spontaneous nervous breakdowns. I remember feeling dumb because I actually had to study for calculus tests; there were clear distinctions between the people who were really smart and aced tests without trying, and those who just worked hard to get a good grade. This actually came out in conversation between kids: “Oh, Suzie sure studied a lot.” “For what, that last calc test? Man, I did that in ten minutes, and spent the rest of class period inventing MENSA puzzles to challenge myself. Cause, the existing ones are so lame. Tee hee.” BARF.

The elitism shone its brightest when it came to college choices. Most of my graduating class ended up going to state schools, despite the pressure of the program teachers and administrators to get kids to go out of state. I understand why; prospective parents (moneybags) want their kids to go to Harvard and Yale, and they’ll be more interested in a program that performs. Simon said that the secretary had told him, in a snooty aside, “Last year, about 80% of the class ended up at KU. You’re a top student. Don’t let your class go to KU.” His reaction: “you answer the fucking phone, in a public school in Wichita, how the hell can you justify being an Ivy League bitch?” Sadly, he did not say this out loud.

KU, as absurd as it sounds to me now, was basically synonymous with failure. If you ended up at KU, you clearly punted all your IB and AP exams, and were on your road to burger-flipping or dealing meth by strip-mall dumpster bins. The administrators had us read through those Princeton Review books and make lists. I applied to a bunch of Ivy League schools, Johns Hopkins, and KU as my safety. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t care much at this point. My GPA sucked, and I was tired of the bullshit elitism. I wasn’t terribly eager to go to a hoity-toity place to face more bullshit elitism.

Then, everybody’s letters started to trickle in. As expected, I was flat out rejected from all of the places but two: KU, and a deferred acceptance to Cornell (meaning I was guaranteed admittance the following year). Lin, a girl, asked about my results and I told her, and she said nothing. Later, we were standing in a group of people discussing the same thing (god, is that all we talked about?), and she actually laughed and said (no joke): “ha ha, karenology got rejected by all of her schools except KU!” Taken aback, I got kind of huffy and mentioned the deferred thing, and she said, “oh, you know that doesn’t count.”

[At this point I should mention that I hold grudges for life, and I have never, ever forgiven this girl. She ended up going to U. Penn to be a full-fledged Ivy League Bitch. Despite the fact that this was years ago and she may not even still be there, every time I hear that someone is going out to Pennsylvania, I tell them about Lin, and how if they see a short, long-haired bitch who looks kind of like a duck, to punch her in the face for me. (Hannah can attest to this). Actually, it occurs to me that I will be driving through Pennsylvania. Hmm. :twisted:]

Luckily, I went to KU and have not yet resorted to selling meth behind dumpsters. I feel pretty satisfied with the education I have gotten here, because though it is a mere state school (perish the thought!), I took initiative in figuring out which professors were good and not so good, which courses would challenge me intellectually, etc. I also didn’t drop $25k on four years of schooling, like Bitch-Who-Looks-Like-A-Duck probably did. I won’t have snazzy Ivy League letterhead on my transcript, but from what I’m told, it doesn’t really matter where you went for undergraduate, anyways.

Some of the people we knew haven’t done quite as well, it’s true. We know a girl who dropped out of classes recently, and is now working at Wal-Mart sorting recycling bins. Simon thinks that she’d been dogged by the ‘humiliation’ of having to go to KU, which ruined her first few semesters. Her GPA never really recovered, and neither did her interest in school, apparently. Same thing with Paul’s ex-girlfriend, Cindy. A good amount of this can probably be blamed on the intensely unhealthy atmosphere in our high school. Yes, I am very lucky to have had such great resources in high school, and it got me off to a great start in college, but I hope it was worth the couple of years shaved off my life due to overanxiety and stress.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m just whining about my privileged education? Well, I certainly am, but check out the quote in the title. This is what is inscribed over the front entrance to the school. My school wasn’t run by Puritans, but it might as well have been.