You know the type: thinks everyone at Bethany sucks, thinks all the Bethany professors suck, thinks her job sucks, thinks all the "popular" kids here suck, thinks most music, movies, and TV shows suck, and never says anything that isn’t vaguely laced with sarcasm. Be honest. You’ve seen such people.
I spent an unpleasant 30 minutes with one such person over the weekend. It was like having lunch with the high school version of myself. Afterwards, I felt the need to bathe, and scrape off some of the evil.
I will agree with her that there’s a certain Bethany professor, whom I will call P, who is possibly one of the most useless teachers I have ever met. If “teaching” is what you can call what goes on in P’s class.
P was teaching here back when I was an undergrad. The classes were usually upper-division stuff, all of which were about very specific fields of study that I was particularly interested in. If we were lucky, we might actually get to those fields of study. First of all, P felt that Bethany students were not up to speed on the current popular theories in our field—possibly because P didn’t discover any of those theories until graduate school—so the first two or three weeks would be spent studying those theories and the people who created them. We even had tests on them. Bear in mind that the class was not called “Twentieth Century Developments,” but that made no bloody difference. We had to learn this stuff because there happened to be a bug up P’s ass.
Okay, so I learned a lot about those theories. I figured I was through with them when I signed up for a second P class. No such luck. P began the second class in the same way; three weeks on theories, followed by a brief and superficial examination of the stuff we were actually supposed to study in the class.
The tests were easy. They consisted of a midterm and a final. P would give us the test questions as our study guide, so there was no way to fail. There might also be a term paper of about five pages. I never got less than an A in P’s classes. However, I learned a lot more by reading the textbooks.
I do have to say that P is a very nice person; is polite, always helpful, great to have conversations with, and is very knowledgeable about the great minds in our field. P has the capability to really stretch your mind and make you take a good, serious look at other perspectives. More than likely P is one of those people who liked their fields of study so much they went to grad school, and couldn’t find anything to do with their graduate degrees other than working as college professors. But lots of knowledge doesn’t necessarily make a person a capable teacher. P is certainly no teacher. But that just happens to be the way the system works, and Bethany is stuck with this particular product of the system.
I am still not going to tell you who P is. Those of you who have had P’s classes already know and don’t need me to confirm it. Those of you who haven’t will find out soon enough.
Kent’s Recommended Read:
Hunter S. Thompson,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I am a little bummed that Hunter Thompson is burning in torment right now. (This is not a judgment call on my part; this is where he himself expected to go.) He was a heck of a writer. I grew up reading his stuff—no one else was twisted enough to write a novel that begins:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
Hilarious. Terrible role model, but a great writer. Too bad.