Ah, the Joys of Teaching Dumb Asses...

There have been many funny tidbits of stupidity going around this year. Almost all originate in the minds of truly ... special freshmen. For instance, there was the child who started an essay along the lines of:

This essay is about the pursuit of happiness. A time I remember being happy was when I was a pothead.

Then there was a student who decided to write about happiness, and what it meant to her. She started off by telling the grader (me) that she really didn't think she could talk about happiness, since it was a deeply personal subject and she felt so strongly about it. Why she still chose to write her - poorly received - essay over it is beyond me. There are also smart-ass punks in the pool, who have been through the class before and are, shall we say, slightly jaded. They are quite specific about meeting the criteria, and make sure we know it, since they announce that they are "now fulfilling the first of the four criteria." I guess they don't want to take the class a third time.

And that has been my evening. But the day has stretched much longer, so I will start with the unexciting back-story.

I printed out everything from the e-reserve cache that I needed for the diseases class. It took me a long time. Not only because there is a lot of it, no, no. In order not to get an error, one has to log onto the library computer, get online, go to the proper place, accept the terms, put the article on the printer spool, log off, log back on, and press print. If you try to do more than one article at a time, you get a screen error. If you try to print immediately, without logging off and on, you get a permanently paused print job, and have to start over. It was what most people call a frustrating experience. I started off in the upstairs reserve printing room, and tried three different computers with no success at all. Then I explored the library looking for other computers and finally found one that was hooked up to a printer that worked. There is also a system now where we must feed our ID into a machine, followed by money (insert weeping here), in order to print much of anything. There is only one of these machines in the library, and it is hard to find. I spent a while on the elevators searching.

Have I ever told you about the elevators at the library? I'm sure I did way back at the beginning of this behemoth I call a blog. There are two sides to the library, and two sets of elevators. Side A bridges to side B in two places. The lobby floor (2), and the fourth floor. In all other floors, one must work to get from side A to side B. See, you have to get into the elevator, go to 2 or 4, walk around the elevator cluster, get back in an elevator, and go to the desired floor on the other side. I swear, if there is ever a fire in that building, everyone inside will die.

Well, after I got my copies (still need to print off the CD stuff, the online stuff, and pick up the coursepack, but then I'll have it all!), I toodled over to the gym and watched Ferris Beuller's Day Off. It was a much more entertaining workout than I had been expecting.

I then came home, knitted for a while, read some, and graded. And now you know the rest of the story, as one Paul Harvey was fond of saying.

Hey guys, thanks for the comments.

End.