post-seminar psychosis
I have just taught a seminar whose participants had a collective IQ of about the same level as the classy stacking chairs on which they were slouched. Now, I have taught at various institutions for over a decade; I've dealt composedly with Oxbridge Tweedy Gits, Central London Urban Guerrillas, Nice Girls in Alice Bands, Pathologically Shy Claustrophobes, Ruddy-Cheeked Rugger Buggers, Philosophically-Literate Goths, and Those Who Think John Grisham is a Novelist. I've taught those who never open their mouths, and those who never shut them. I've taught people who casually name-drop German phenomenologists, and those for whom Buffy Studies is an over-ambitious intellectual concept.
You get the picture. I am not inexperienced, nor unduly dewy-eyed, nor - till today - spectacularly jaded.
But, oh, the finger-chewing horror of this dead-eyed group, in whose slack-jawed company I get to spend a weekly pair of hours between now and the end of November, attempting to interest them in books without pictures, and probably, as the semester progresses, sticking pencils up my nose and hanging members of the class out the window by their illiterate ankles for my kicks.
I should have been a tax lawyer/politician/traffic warden/ promoter of fraudulent pyramid schemes.
You get the picture. I am not inexperienced, nor unduly dewy-eyed, nor - till today - spectacularly jaded.
But, oh, the finger-chewing horror of this dead-eyed group, in whose slack-jawed company I get to spend a weekly pair of hours between now and the end of November, attempting to interest them in books without pictures, and probably, as the semester progresses, sticking pencils up my nose and hanging members of the class out the window by their illiterate ankles for my kicks.
I should have been a tax lawyer/politician/traffic warden/ promoter of fraudulent pyramid schemes.