Nice not to teach today

I had the pleasure this morning of sitting in my own ENGL102 class while it was taught by a graduate assistant. Cook Library offers database/research/MLA style classes and I've never taken advantage of this service until today. What fun! I spent the hour researching Sartre, Beauvoir, Leiris, Sand, and Rousseau for the 15-page paper Francis dropped on my ass last week. In French. My speaking is passable, my reading is pretty good, my writing is fucking abysmal. I kept wincing at what my students were doing to the poor young lady who'd taken my workload upon herself, however.

The grad assitant was a treat. She was buffeted continuously by anxiety. "Can anyone come up with another search term for 'death penalty'?" she'd ask, drifting from behind her podium, then out to the aisle, then back to the screen, wringing her hands. In her left she held a laser pointer that she kept forgetting was there. She blinded half my students flashing that thing around spastically. They did what 8am 102 students often do--they refused to answer her questions without a fight. She didn't take their silence too well, either, because this was her first in front of the classroom experience and she was being graded by two faculty who sat with me in the back. "Ok, no, nobody can think of another search term? How about capital punishment? Is that ok?" Silence. She kept asking variations of the same question or moving to another question much too quickly. Were I to coach her I'd suggest picking one student at random and asking "What do you think?" Nothing like the threat of random selection to get volunteers going. Her shoulders sagged each time there was no response, then she actually stopped in the middle of the aisle after another hopeless void of interminable cynical blank stares, and--just as I was about to get up and say "Have mercy on this poor young woman, and answer her damn questions or you lose your class participation points for the whole semester!"--brandishing her laster pointer, she explained with a great deal of what in more animated people would be called passion that they "really should consider speaking up because it would make things more fun, well, probably not for you, but at least for me, ok, well no." Then they started to pity her, and hands went up.

I found her enormously attractive with her upside-down gourd-shaped vaguely Gallic face; she was thin but well-rounded in the hips with dark sunken eyes and tiny wire rim glasses. She wore a kind of late Victorian faux Asian pattern in crimson with little huts and trees and moons embroidered in silk thread: very sheer and clingy skirt and top, with black stockings and buckled shoes. And the hair--great billowing gouts of unstyled, uncombed, and still wet red hair all the way down to her ass. I imagine she'd had a bowl of ethereal for breakfast. She looked like she needed a hug, and also looked like a hug would completely shatter her. I remember my first teaching experience vividly. I was a long-haired freaky burnout in a homeless guy's clothing and I sat in the third row until all the students had arrived, talking about how much I hated English class with several of them, and I wondered what the teacher would be like, etc. I got to know a lot about my students in five minutes. Then I got up and went to the front and there was general hilarity; they'd fallen for it, and thought I was merely another student.

I'm too old to pull that one off anymore!


I've got 20 essays to grade and I refuse to look at them. I read one paragraph and was instantly depressed by its wretchedness. I'll do them over Thanksgiving break. Speaking of break, after Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh" at 9am, I'll be on my weekend. Ah, gotta love it.