Conversations with former students in food courts
The previous post was too depressing to share over here, but I figure there are enough teachers reading this make cross-posting it worthwhile.
FORMER STUDENT: Hey, Scott!
SEK: Howdy, FS.
FS: I miss your class, man. This [next one in the writing sequence] sucks ass. I got a fucking [non-passing grade] on the first paper.
SEK: Did you [do everything SEK taught him to do, e.g. revise, revise, revise]?
FS: This prof doesn’t make us revise.
SEK: But what led to you earning an “A” in my class?
FS: All the revising.
SEK: So what do you need to earn an “A” in this next class?
FS: I told you, though, this prof doesn’t make us revise.
SEK: But how did you earn an “A” in my class?
FS: Revising.
SEK: So how can you earn an in this next one?
FS: I don’t know, Scott, that’s what I’m asking you.
SEK: But—
FS: You gotta help a brother out.
SEK: One more time: How did you earn an “A” in my course?
FS: I already told you, this prof isn’t telling us to revise.
SEK: (shrugs)
FS: (shrugs back)
SEK: (emphatically shrugs while repeatedly overturning invisible cups on an invisible table)
FS: (stares for a minute, turns, walks away) Right, dude, I see what you’re saying. Cups it is, man, cups it is!
SEK: “Cups”? Come back! (FS moves briskly through the food court) WHAT IS “CUPS”?
SEK realizes that standing alone in the middle of a food court yelling “WHAT IS ‘CUPS’”? leaves an odd impression on bystanders and walks away muttering something, most likely “What is ‘cups’?” under his breath.
This post should be called “SEK Shrugged”
You know, looking over most of my little play-type-things, I think “shrugs” is the most common italicized parenthetical, and I think that says a lot about me. Crazy shit happens, I’m not surprised, merely mildly perturbed, so it elicits not anger, but a world-weary shrug … and I haven’t even earned that world-weariness! (Or maybe, at this point, I have. Hard to tell.)
You advised him to start drinkng:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cups
Worked for Churchill.
What also worked for Churchill was all the people who worked for Churchill.
Mind you, I love Churchill’s books, including and perhaps especially the early ones, the ones he definitely wrote himself. His books that were mostly originally written as newspaper dispatches have a tremendous urgency, and the books he wrote for vindication and for income in the 20s and 30s are great works of history. But his History Of The Second World War, for which he won the Nobel, was in large part not his own work. David Reynolds’s book on the subject is well worth a read.
You see whenever I think of CUPS I think of the very nice print server that some open source guy developed. Who knew that CUPS is also a popular phrase that refers to drinking alcohol.
Would cups refer to bra size? Maybe he thinks with a bigger cup size he can get a better grade in the class.
or it’s an acronym — Chronic Universal Palaver System (CUPS)
Or, it’s yet another right-wing commentator making it because she’s a woman? Oh, that’s cup-p.
It’s worse than that ….. the student wasn’t actually there at all, and cups is what you were in?
Maybe he was referring to conservative blogger S.E. Cupp?
By the way, what was the intended significance of your “repeatedly overturning invisible cups on an invisible table”? Because if any exists, it eludes me.
I don’t get it either.
Similarly eluded.
Yeah, I’m going to go with the student was completely baffled by SEK’s pantomime and decided to humor him with a “whatever you say, man” kind of response.
Of course, this doesn’t excuse said student’s obtuseness at SEK’s verbal advice. But it’s not all that surprising: the student probably thought revising got him an A in SEK’s class because he was being graded on the revisions not because revising made the final paper better. Since he won’t be submitting revisions to the new prof–and thus won’t be graded on them–he sees no utility to revising. I’ve seen similar attitudes a lot.
As noted as my place:
I was aiming for the clearly not universal gesture of come-on-you’re-almost-there-you-can-do-it. Imagine me doing it quickly and with both hands synchronized, almost like I’m a traffic cop waving at myself. (Describing waving is, I just now learned, rather difficult to do well.)
It’s a common enough gesture, and has nothing to do with cups.
Both hand pointed inward, palms towards your chest, revolving in towards yourself?
Gotcha.
For some reason, I was incapable of typing the words “Imagine I’m standing in front of a sink, holding two coconuts, and using them, in a synchronized fashion, to splash my chest with cool, clear water.” Really, though, it’s just not that easy to describe how hands move. That said, NOT CUPS.
“WHAT IS “CUPS”?
Is it wrong that I want a t-shirt that says this?
Well, a little bit. It looks too much like all those “who is John Galt” or “Ask Me About My Salvation” cutesy evangelical come-ons. Still, it does seem that one more gifted than myself could come up with a good way to propagate the meme.
“WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH?”
The cake is a lie!
Is it wrong that I want a t-shirt that says this?
Only if it’s wrong that I demand 50 percent of anything you make off it.
“Brain and brain, what is brain?”
Two girls one cup
FBI: Hello, Mr. Thompson.
Homer: (whispers) I think he’s talking to you.
Yeah, that’s where I went too.
About 10 years ago I had this nice kid in my acting class in the fall semester, and my Theatre class in the spring.
I was also directing him in “Much Ado About Nothing” spring, where he had a small role.
Now, every night I put a half-filled plastic bottle or two with water to freeze so that I always had cold water to drink when I was on campus (I didn’t want to pay for buying bottles of water at the school since I could just refill the ice-filled bottle(s) with water at a fountain and save money – important for anyone who’s been an Adjunct).
So, at a break during one of the rehearsals he looks at me and says, “You know, I always wanted to ask you something.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“How do you get the ice into those bottles?”
I looked at him, stunned. He’s looking at me.
Then, still shocked, I asked him, “What did you get on your SAT’s?”
“Why?” he says.
I said, “Think about it.”
He’s still looking at me, now thinking. He shrugs his shoulders.
I say to him, “Look, this isn’t a little wooden ship in this bottle. It’s frozen water.”
Pause…
“OH!!!”
Spoiler, I guess: Jay Baruchel’s character in Million-Dollar Baby makes the same mistake.
I think turning your brain off for some things is a nearly universal human trait.
I’ve seen the film, know the actor, and I can’t tell what’s been spoiled, so I think you’re safe. (He was in that? Granted, I don’t take super-self-serious directors like Eastwood all that seriously, as they tend to make solid, forgettable films, but I should remember one of the Apatow clan showing up in one of them.)
He was the retarded boxer-hopeful, Anthony Mackie bullies him, Morgan Freeman one-punches Anthony Mackie.
I spoiled that one joke. I was being a bit tongue in cheek, since there’s bigger things in that movie to spoil.
I’m just keeping my fingers crossed in hope that FS comes back thanking you for helping improve his grades.
That’s the idea: I have them for ten weeks, teach them a couple hundred film terms, show them how those techniques work in concert and, more importantly, how deploying analysis of them in essays can make them sound like they possess expertise, despite being novices. The whole idea is to create a recursive pride-and-work-ethic loop, with revision as its cornerstone. Because honestly, in ten weeks, the most you can hope for, at least in terms of writing, is the inculcation of a productive ethos. I like to think I’m largely successful in this respect, but then again, everyone likes to think they do their job well.
How many times did you revise this?
Odd, the effects of changing technology. In my youth, the academics gave lip service to revision, but the first thing they taught me in my first job doing legal research and writing was to get it right the first time. Before modern word processing, the secretarial time involved in multiple revisions was simply too expensive.