Dateline: College Library

I'm sitting at one of my preferred late-semester work spots - a booth in the Open Book Café - and taking in the milieu. College Library is a veritable shit-storm of undergraduate annoyingness after 6:00 PM and during finals week, but it is a surprisingly placid place during the late-morning/early-afternoon lull. There's stuff going on around me, but with my headphones in, they just make for white noise (or, rather, the visual equivalent of white noise, whatever that might be).

Occasionally, I'll mute whatever I'm listening to - typically, the soundtrack from The Motorcycle Diaries or an older Röyksopp album, both perennial study albums - and listen to the conversations around me. Today, for some reason, those conversations are almost entirely bad Spanish presentations. I have to fight the incredibly strong impulse to walk over to the table of frat boys next to me and explain how "¿Porqué no creer yo?" does not mean "Why don't you believe me?" (that would be, "¿Porqué no me crees?", douchebags). But I don't. Because it's untoward, and Sigma Chi Retard over there needs to learn an important lesson about how not showing up to class for three weeks has a direct correlation to looking like a dumbass in front one's entire Spanish class. Though I don't like it in my own class, I do like the idea of subjecting bad students to shaming rituals elsewhere.

I probably should shame some of my students, as more than a few of them are writing BAT-SHIT INSANE FINAL PAPERS. Yesterday's presentations were bookended with some real classics. The first student to present, typically one of my better writers, wrote about the similarities and dissimilarities between Barack Obama and - wait for it - Tupac Shakur. He never said why we should compare them and, more problematically, talked more about their similarities than their differences. And you can probably guess what the similarities were. This was followed by eight more or less acceptable presentations. However, the last presentation, complete with a sparkly poster-board thing, was about the history of vampires. THE HISTORY OF VAMPIRES. Holy shit. Holy, holy shit. Really? It turned out to be not terrible - she did not, as I feared, explain how vampires came to exist or how they immigrated to America via pork shipments from Eastern Europe - but there was no argument. None. Thus, it fails the assignment. Very troubling.

I should remind you, gentle Reader, that I am teaching a class on music. With this last project prompt, I gave them permission to go off the reservation and write on a subject that interested/was academically pertinent for them. And some students did just that, producing some great work. My best student, a Horticulture major, did a great piece on the fear of genetically-modified crops; my problem-student-turned-student-I-actually-get-along-with talked about the limits of gene splicing; and my very likable Gambian student made an interesting (though not entirely sound) argument for the legalization of organ sales (body organs, not the other kind). Nothing if not interesting.

But the rest proved that whole "enough rope=noose, self, hanging" axiom. Thank god I don't have to actually comment on their final drafts. I did some damage control today via student conferences and e-mail, but I'm more than mildly concerned that the idea of a "well-reasoned argument" has passed over my students, despite the fact that I spent an entire week discussing and illustrating just that concept. Quite upsetting.

I also met with a student today who more or less argued that, without religion, U.S. society would face inevitable and irreversible decay. (I had to quash the desire to hit him with a copy of Nietzsche's collected works.) What was troubling was that he's typically a thoughtful and intellectually-engaged student - his writing has been problematic but, more often than not, characterized by a desire to engage with his subject in a novel way (a trait often lacking from students here). For him to turn in a logically weak essay rife with quotations from pieces of religiously conservative, far-right propaganda - that was disturbing. It still astounds me to see the extent to which young, intelligent students get suckered into radical intellectual positions like this (on either side of the political divide). Most of our conference ended up being me unpacking the faulty logic that underpins the claims he cites. Luckily, he didn't get overly defensive or confrontational, as a lot of students tend to do in these situations, but I'm not entirely convinced he saw the logical fallacies I pointed out. A vexed encounter, I would say.

Well, back to tombs and corpses and whatnot. I need a big day today, so that I'm not bonered later tonight. But I probably will be. By Ned.