“we’ve got a runner.”
Spring ‘07. I can’t remember the title of the class, but it was some Political Science class that I think we were required to take. Patterson, John, and I were all in the same class together, which was always a recipe for disaster, especially if Freaks and Monsters was any indication.
Well, Patterson alone was always a recipe for disaster, he made a course on Indian religions rather interesting as well, but that’s neither here nor there.
This class was taught by a graduate student who shall remain nameless, as I wouldn’t want to besmirch her good name, but yeah, it was a pretty lame class. She was as liberal as they come, especially in her teaching style, she was trying totally “new and hip” ways of teaching that actually came across as pretty lame almost all of the time.
I mean, you can’t knock her for trying, but it was cringeworthy at times. By “at times”, I mean “basically all of the time.” Like, you’d walk into class and she’d be pounding Rage Against the Machine on her Macbook because it’s music that “really makes you think about stuff” or something.
There were lots of things that happened in that class, but here perhaps is our crowning achievement.
It was a class where attendance wasn’t counted everyday, but somedays she would pass around a paper to sign into or have an activity and you would get graded on whether you participated.
One such activity was one of those aforementioned cringeworthy lame things. I remember we had to get into groups to roleplay various people/groups. Like, one person was supposed to be the UN, another was a businessman, another was a poor farmer in South America, et cetera. It was pretty goofy for college students to do, something I couldn’t really get into, anyway, and I think my two cohorts were feeling the same way.
I remember feeling a little bit bad because we needed four people in a group, and the three of us had paired up with some random girl who apparently didn’t know anyone in the class. We were sitting in a little circle of desks, looking over the papers the teacher had handed us, instructing us how the roleplay was supposed to go down.
The three of us noticed the teacher had temporarily stepped out while we were working in our groups, presumably to go to the bathroom or something. We looked at each other. We had already signed in for the day.
“I’m thinking we should bail,” one of us said. We mulled it over. She would notice we were gone, but this activity was incredibly lame. Like I said, I felt bad for that girl because she was like, “you guys are bailing?” I remember her actually saying “bailing” like it was a foreign word to her or something.
We kicked it around a bit longer, but ultimately, yes, we were bailing. Our groupmate got up and tried to merge into another group, and we packed our bags. We walked out of the classroom, into the hallway, talking shit about how stupid of an activity it is. ”Uhh, Durr, I’m the UN!” probably was uttered at some very mature point.
But the maturity level was only beginning to show. The building had a long hallway with doors on either end, and you had to go out those doors into an outdoor area where the stairs were. We opened the door, goofing off and laughing, and boom, who was there on the other side?
Our teacher. She was like looking at signs posted on the bulletin board, which obviously was a real efficient use of her teaching time. But I digress. She turned and looked at us, standing probably five feet away.
Now, here I was just complaining that such a silly roleplay activity wasn’t really suited to college-aged kids. But how did these college-aged kids react to being caught red-handed in the act of ditching class?
We ran.
We just took off, bolting towards the stairs. We might have even said something like “oh shit” right before the three of us took flight. I remember thinking and/or saying, “this is so fucking stupid!”, self-conscious of the act but taking part in it all the same. When we got to the first floor, we were laughing hard and asking ourselves if we really just ran away from our teacher as if we were in grade school.
She never said anything directly about it in class. She probably wasn’t even surprised that we were ditching class, since we were the resident shitheads in that class anyway, but even I still can’t believe how we reacted. Did we think she was going to turn us into the truancy cops or something?
The best part of that class was our final reports. She sent them over email, so I still have mine. All three of us had a very similar line, basically word for word, at the end of our report, with only the grade values changed. Here is what it said:
“I would have given you an [one grade higher than what we got] for the consistency and quality of your work; however, your in-class ‘negative’ participation was, quite honestly, a distraction and annoyance.”
