As many of you are aware, the first term of summer session is upon us now. And, I know we all hope that a summer class brings us joyful students who, by basking in the warm summer sun, are filled with endorphins that make them open to the compressed learning experience they’re about to have. Yeah, right….
Speaking of compressed, I believe I had an entire 10 working days between the end of the spring semester and the beginning of our summer term. That’s just enough time to get wickedly drunk once, clean up the aftermath of a personal bacchanal, and pull some semblance of a 6-week summer offering out of one’s ass. This is not the prestidigitation to which I aspire, by the by.Right now, we’re two weeks into the semester and I could pretty much just fail half the buggers in my class right here and now. I really felt Froderich’s pain when his astronomy students don’t want to go out at night and, here’s mine: it’s a post-modern lit crit course AND they’re already whining that the dead, French guy stuff we need to read is too hard. What the phuck? If it’s post-modern and it’s literary criticism, there’s gonna be a dead French guy in there somewhere.
This sorry lot bellying up to the conference table thrice weekly is [insert shudder]: graduate students. Currently, Cornelius Cornhole is gunning for my prestidigitatious ass on a platter because I failed his first critical review. He wrote it in bullet form but wasn’t actually sure how to use the bullets in Word; thus, there are no bullets. There’s just lines hanging on a page. …nice po’ mo’ interpretation there, Corny.
Annabelle Asinine sent me some sort of liquored-up email rejoinder about the content of the day’s class. Her 2 am ramblings included a cut-down of the course, a curse on all of France’s citizens (especially the dead ones) and mention that she seems to be in some sort of early onset menopause. If this last fact was true, she’d know it’s actually spelled meanopause. Hormone shifts make you nasty, not stupid, Annabelle. It’s not Dr. Schadenfrau ‘cause I’m all sweetness and light.
Just moments ago, I received an email from Fernando Flagrante. Fernando would like me to know that the imposition of the MLA style on his prose causes him to have vascular constriction in the creative hemispheres of his brain. Judging by the tone of his email, I’d say the vascular constriction is caused by the bunching of his briefs in the nether regions.
So, the summer is off to a rollicking start. How many more weeks of this hell do I have?
