Legitimating Credentials

I think I shall have to write a book character using Effie as my template. I'm truly amazed that such individuals exist, although it does serve to disprove evolution. If the order of the universe was truly survival of the fittest, then this chick would have been eaten by a stegosaurus LONG ago.

We had a fight actually break out in class the other day. Yes, I said a fight. There's an older guy in class that I'm rather fond of in in a patronizing sort of way. He's come back to school and he's busting his butt to finish his education. I admire that, and I support all adults who do such a thing. He's not horrendously old or anything--I'd guess late thirties. But the fact remains that he's one of the older members of the class. It takes a lot of courage to walk into a class filled to the brim with snotty eighteen-year-olds.

Our story begins with Effie flipping through her slides at a Kryptonian speed. (Yeah, there's another story. In my last test, I was trying to decide whether she wanted her answer, the book answer, or the correct answer. You see the dilemma there. I figured out that she wanted her answer, which is highly irritating because her answer ISN'T usually the correct one. However, it's next to impossible to give her her answer, because she flips through the slides so fast that I don't have to time to hear what her answer is. So basically, we're all screwed. I love how I'm making A's in my upper level classes and I'm having trouble in a rinky dink world civ class. Oh, the irony.) Whenever we ask her to slow down, she laughs delightedly and says that she really would prefer her students just paying attention. Not that we can pay attention to what she's saying because she won't make all the darn jocks shut up enough for me to hear what she's saying in the first place. She doesn't take into consideration, of course, the people that are visual learners. I'm not going to remember a thing from her lecture unless I write it down in my notebook.

Anyway, one of the girls in the second row leaned forward and asked this older guy what the last slide had said since she hadn't had time to finish writing what it said. However, the way she asked was, "Hey, dude, what'd that last slide say?" I admit here, this older guy did WAY overreact. He got all bristly and said that he wasn't a dude, and that she should respect him more. The girl took great offense at this, and started screeching that he was old and didn't belong there in the first place. Effie finally notices that there's a brawl occurring right under her nose, and asks them to respect one another. They do not begin respecting, though, probably because they are slightly busy bellowing at one another. Finally Effie gets their attention, and asks them to see her after class. Like we're back in kindergarten or something. I wonder if she put them in separate corners after class until they were ready to behave like big kids.

Of course, I spent the whole time this was happening shaking in laughter--not out of hilarity, mind, but out of complete disbelief that this was really happening in a COLLEGE classroom. I'd never been exposed to that kind of behavior since my mom started homeschooling me.

Two more gems: on one of Effie's slides, she had the words "excavation cites" up there for all the world to see. *facepalm*

She also said that the Mayans used their gods to "legitimate" their rule.

Oh, for graduate school....