People Who Deserve to Be Bludgeoned

I'm thinking this title may recur at various times, as I am annoyed by a parade of humans.

This time, it's one of my future students that must be bludgeoned with a brick.

In 2 weeks I have to start teaching again. I teach at a big university where I am a tiny cog in the gargantuan machine. When I have the summer off, those three months are my sanctuary, my personal Candy Utopia. Away from the backbiting faculty, away from the hung-over, sniveling, whiny-ass, waste of human flesh undergrads. They are not all horrible of course. Some I actually like. Some I look forward to seeing.

Then you have students like the chick in one of my poetry classes, who, in mid-July wrote me this email:

Dear Professor:

My name is (blah blah) and I'll be in your fall semester poetry class. Could you please forward me your syllabus now?


Yeah. No problem. You rotten little overachieving, intrusive, pushy lump of biomass. I'm not enjoying my time off. What I really want to do is spoonfeed you my nonexistent syllabus, because I know that YOU will be the most important student in the class. By far.

One of my fabulous former students, who is now a close friend, told me that I should have responded this way:

"We will be reading the complete poetic works of Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, Robert Blake, Sylvia Plath, Shel Silverstein, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth, Longfellow, Henry Van Dyke, and several anthologies, including, at minimum, "The Doctorate Student's Guide to Understanding Marlowe's Poetic Soul" (We will most especially be emphasizing pages 879-1564 the first week of class) and "An Anthology of Poetry Commonly Found Hidden In Physics Text books." Furthermore, all students will be required to submit a pre-class portfolio so that I may see as to whether or not I should teach you this semester. All morons will be dismissed." Then on the first day of class, act like "Oh, I didn't write that. I must have had a virus. Yeah, we're going to start with coloring."

See why I love this woman? See why we sat at an Italian restaurant talking for 6 hours the first time we got together?