November 16, 2005
Although my current list of "People I'd Like to Stab" has reached a number that resides somewhere between the numbers of 30 and 45,659, I feel that there is one person in particular who should, by reasons of paramount offense, be brought to the front of the line.And I don't even know her name.
She lectures in the same room an hour before one of my classes. The other day, as I was taking my usual seat, she could still be found addressing the comments of students who had just received grades on their latest exam papers. As my own professor entered the room, she apologized for her presence by stating,
"I'm sorry. You hand back an exam and all of a sudden student's start caring about their grades."
No, no, I thought, I'm sorry for paying upwards of $900 per hour for you to exceed your time limit in this particular classroom so that I might be indirectly bashed by your callous commentary. Please excuse my inevitable failure in seeking a state of higher learning so that I might someday be able to join the ranks of someone as omniscient as yourself. Regard the presence of myself and my classmates as a mere afterthought of your precious time which must, at some point, involve the plucking of legs of innocent spiders if they dare cross your path during your moments of leisure.
In reflection, perhaps the 'apology' she made should have been directed toward how sorry she is about the current status of this institution's enrollment. Obviously, the problem lies not in the fact that she was unable to announce to her students that they could make out of class appointments regarding their exams, but in the overall lack for a love of knowledge that has encompassed the hearts of those who pay her wages.
Whether her commentary stemmed from a brief bout of frustration, I shall never know. Be it a form of venting, an expulsion of dissatisfaction regarding her students or an overall bad day, I wish I would have responding by stating that she had no right in making crass assumptions about the very people that she has chosen to teach. I wanted to ask her her name so that I might never have the divine pleasure of residing through one of her lectures which I'm sure would have been ignored anyway. I wanted to her to feel the unrest that swelled in my stomach for the duration of my class. There were a multitude of retorts that I could have made which would have returned the ball of abuse back into her court, but I'd like to think that I'm a bit above all of that.
After all, as Calvin Coolidge once said, "I've never been hurt by anything I didn't say."