Oh my gawd Becky...

Because my previous posts have led to e-mails, comments, and even phone calls regarding my grammar and my use of homophones I've not wanted to post recently. Or maybe it is the whole going back to work, getting sick, and then starting grad school simultaneously that has led to my laziness (and lack of real-life incidents to write about).

I do feel compelled to share one particular observation I made this weekend.

This weekend wasn't really a weekend. To observers on the outside (my coworkers) they probably could conclude that I cut class on Friday to enjoy a FOUR day weekend. That would have been nice, and admittedly I've done it before (see trips to San Francisco and New Orleans) but calling for a sub this weekend did not involve peninsular cities. This weekend involved 30 hours of lectures on information organization, or as it has been renamed so my salary can double "metadata." I know, I know you are jealous, you are thinking WOW cataloging and databases how interesting! In truth there is more to it than that (i.e. the problem solving) but that is not what this little blog is about.

This blog is about classmates. Now I've sat through some classes with some interesting classmates. From high school the one that most stands out in my mind was Ben, who slept in the aisle beside me in Calculus class. No harm no foul. There were annoying characters in high school, but it seems I dodged a bullet. In college it was Sharon, who seemed to pick her history classes based on the ones I had registered for. Sharon was a dull girl, she didn't change her homemade clothes often and had the annoying habit of wanting to be smart but also not really listening. Her hair was greasy. Which meant she asked a lot of questions that had already been answered five minutes before. Again, for the most part I dodged the bullet.

Grad school though is a different story. My classes now encompass a much larger demographic, to the degree that the Gen Xers and the Baby Boomers almost got in a fight when a Baby Boomer said "Gen Xers don't read, do we really want to develop all this technology to serve them when the solution should really just be to get them to read; aren't we just feeding their ignorance." There were two older ladies in the class that seemed to have an ~irrelevant~ comment about metadata in the corporate world, and had parallels to everything we were talking about on some database (that this audience of librarians already knows about).

On the back row the bad kids started races to see who would make the most extraneous comments, Jewel won.

Jewel though was not my problem, in fact my problem didn't hit me until Saturday. Becky (we'll use another pseudonym here) was most certainly the star student. Her hair was in a perfect I'm-a-serious-student-so-while-my-hair-is-perfectly-styled-it-looks-like-I-didn't-put-any-effort-into-it ponytail. She carried a 64 ounce bottle of water to class every day. She drank the coffee provided AFTER spending five minutes balancing out the flavor with cream, sugar, and hot water - sampling each sip and adjusting according to her refined palate. By today I realized that she was arriving an hour early for each class to set up the contents of the rollerboard suitcase in and around her desk.

Apparently Friday she was lost, but as time went on she began to catch on to the schemes being presented. As Dr. E carried on his lectures and his explaination of our project there becan to be a soft echo across the room "ohhhhhh..." and "yes, yes, yes..."

While transcribed it sounds like it might have been an orgasm, it wasn't. It was much more akin to her being in church, propped up with four color-coded highlighters for for her notes; two binders (for the lecture notes and the project discriptions). Her "ohhhhhs" and "yes" very well could have graduated into an "Amen, Dr. E., amen!" Keep in mind this is all about classification, cataloging, and information systems...

That would be why I don't work in private schools, I feel like there would be a much higher chance of me being fired for calling some poor girl "an annoying little tart."

As it stands now I'm not sure they would know it was an insult.

In truth there was a lot of cataloging going on in the class. The back row (where I was dutifully sitting) took not only a catalog of her outbursts bust also broke them down into "questions" "fake questions" "ohhhhs" and "yeses" 257 in total over the course of three days. We also worked on crossword puzzles and sudoku.

Now those are my kind of students.