Category Archives: The University

Repeat What the Professor Says

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The pre-major (that it even came into existence) seemed an indication of the institutiton’s lack of commitment to General Education, even a stake in its very heart.  General Education, as I had understood it, was there in part to give the student a look around at the landscape of learning and repeataftermeto locate, perhaps, in it something he or she had not seen or heard of before and might find attractive, even inspirational.

I understood the need for the pre-major as the means by which to create an artifical bottleneck that might slow the flow of students into “impacted” majors.  I understood too that were I a student and wanted to get into a particular major the very first thing I would do would be to take the courses required for the pre-major.  Waiting around to take your pre-major classes was bound only to prolong the anxiety about whether one was going to get in the major or not.

But so much for General Education (GE); those courses had to be pushed aside, while the pre-major was taken care of, with the result that GE’s no longer served for many as an opening vista onto the possibilities of higher education but as an impediment to getting into the major and finally an impediment to graduation.  The last thing one wished to know about on the way out the door was all the things one had missed, all the things one might have learned but had shoved aside in the intererts of timely progress towards graduation.

As a result GE classes begin to fill, not with freshmen and sophomores just embarking on their educational adventures, but with jaded juniors and seniors who did not want to have any sort of educational adventure at all.

I taught a number of years ago a writing course linked to a general education course, Philosophy 5, Introduction to Ethics.  Because of an ongoing beef with the registrar and inadquatee upfront advertising, my section was low.  I thought maybe they would drop it, but instead I was allowed to keep it running with only 15 students.

 I was terrified for these students.  Each and every one was in his or her very first quarter at the university.  Of the 15, three males were causcasian, and all the rest were either asian or latino, latina.  They had never read ethics before; they didn’t read well in any case.  They knew nothing about ethics and they were competing for a grade in a course that was 25% seniors.  I didn’t think my guys stood a chance.  When I saw early samples of their writing I was sure they were all going to fail.

I had to do what I hate doing.  I had to cut to the chase.  I told them: at the university there is no room for your thinking.  You are all in any case idiots.  You don’t know a thing and you shouldn’t ever get the idea that you do.  Accordingly your task, in exams and papers, is:

 TO REPEAT WHAT THE TEACHER SAYS.  THIS IS YOUR WORK.  TO DO THIS WORK PROPERLY, YOU MUST GO TO LECTURE AND TAKE NOTES. THEN YOU MUST MEMORIZE THOSE NOTES.  WHETHER OR NOT YOU UNDERSTAND THE NOTES IS NOT IMPORTANT; IF NOTES ARE SOLD THROUGH THE NOTE TAKING SERVICE, BUY AND MEMORIZE THOSE NOTES AS WELL  AND WHEN THE TIME COMES REPEAT WHAT YOU HAVE MEMORIZED.  DO NOT FIGHT THIS. DO NOT RESIST THIS. JUST DO IT AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO COMPETE WITH THE JUNIORS AND SENIORS IN THE CLASS WHO ALREADY KNOW WHAT I AM TELLING YOU NOW!

The “Pre-Major” ; Or: The Death of Liberal Arts Continued

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These numbers aren’t exact.  But there are in the ballpark.  Something like 14% of all institutions of higher education in this country are large land grant public research universities and this 14% endofworldhands out about 50% of all four year college degrees in the country.  The large land grant for which I work is fairly typical I do believe of all the others, and if this is the case then the right wing of this country that would prefer people live in ignorance has won big time.

For in all these land grants I expect general education is in disarray, ill-coordinated, poorly taught and generally resented.  These courses scattered here and there represent the broken shards of what was once called a liberal arts education.  Now we have the reactionary arts—I suppose they are best called—or no education at all. 

For diverse reasons—economic and political—the university or more properly the multiversity when it came to general education just caved.  Part of it had to do, I guess, with the death of the canon and the fact that most of that dead canon was written by dead white men and not progressive and hip living people of both sexes.  By attempting to appear the flagship of political correctness the humanities reamed themselves, having then to throw out, not without bitching, moaning, and bitter in-fighting the very materials, subjects and author that had been their bread and butter.

And to my dismay all throughout the 70s and well into the 80s deconstructionism spread its obscurationist haze over the whole mess.  The result was, well, appalling.  And to put the matter clearly, I am not opposed to obscure writing.  I think Hegel terribly obscure but still worth the attempt, but not Derrida or his midget minions who began to turn the teaching of literature into a way of  talking, a discourse—I suppose the terminally hip would say—available to and understood only by the initiated.

People were coming in droves out of the universities, especially the East Coast ones, not educated but schooled.  I didn’t know what schooled meant until I attended a summer seminar—six weeks, I think it was—on the topic of the Sublime, taught by a young woman of impeccable credentials, Yale by way of parents who had been on the Freedom Buses down south.  And after each of our two hour sessions, we ordinary teachers from small liberal arts colleges across the country would come out furrowing our brows and wondering just how stupid we might be since we couldn’t understand a word of what she said, though she was apparently speaking English.

But I digress.  Though not exactly.  This was part of it, but as I said many factors contributed to the demise of the general education and the liberal arts education.  The university, in financial crisis due to things like Proposition 13 in California, found itself hustling for students and the bucks they brought.  And the students were not going where they used to go.  They were going especially to places that had business degrees and to places with degrees in communications (whatever the hell that was).

One result of this was “impacted” majors—way too many students to handle, and this led in turn to the creation of the pre-major, actual courses students had to take, usually with a C average or better, in order to qualify for the major, during those first two years especially when students had traditionally taken their General Education courses.

I don’t need no general education!

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My little classroom is a place of contestation, conflict and confusion though no effort of my own.  First—and I do have to keep reminding myself—my writing course—the one I most teach—is required.  Period.  The students exercise little or no choice.  Instructors’ names are not listed for this particular course, so students can’t pick among instructors even if they knew who any of them were (which they don’).  Mostly a particular class is selected on the basis of the days of the week and the time of day it is offered.  Since no reasoning seems to go into it, I have had lately classes with 26 people not a one of whom knows another.

While my class is probably the most resented, because required, class on campus; students resent other required classes also.  I haven’t heard much complaint about it lately—perhaps because these students don’t complain openly much—but a while back a good third of the students in any class resented the General Education requirements.  They just didn’t see the point.

The general education classes are there for the purposes of general education.  Students are required to take a history course here and a philosophy course there and some science class and a class in literature or the social sciences.  Most of these classes have little or nothing to do with students’ majors and are intended, I suppose, to produce more of a well rounded individual, a person who knows in a generally educated way a little something about the world around him or her.

 I have sat through a number of these General Education courses.  As part of my work as a Writing Instructor I have taught and continue to teach an occasional writing class linked to a General Education class.  This means all the students in my writing class are also enrolled in the same general education; and to make the classes work together in some way I usually attend the lectures for these courses and try, as well, to do the readings assigned the students. 

I understand why students have some troubles with these courses.  First, since many students have to take said courses, they are usually overloaded lecture classes, with a minimum of about 240 students with a Teaching Assistant teacher and a few other TAs to service their educational needs.  The classes taught more as general education courses and less as an extention of the professor’s research are the most “popular.”reubens

I attended for example an art history lecture in an 800 seat lecture hall.  About every seat was full the first day though by the fourth week perhaps a third were occupied on a regular basis.  This course had a professor, not a TA; he had some vision I think of art history as arising from and registering particular historical situations.  But the deeper ideas just seemed to go by the boards as the professor showed one slide after another and made a few remarks on each.

The tests were of the identify the slide variety.  Students liked this class because they didn’t have to understand anything; all they had to do was memorize slides.  They used mnemonic devices that had little or nothing to do with what the professor said about the painting, as in “isn’t he the guy with the pink clouds” or “isn’t he the guy with the really fat women.”

12 hours of study per week

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One student insisted, “We are lazy and I can prove it.”  OK, I said, I don’t know what the proof could be but what do you mean.  “My boyfriend is always losing his remote somewhere, so he went up to Home Depot and bought a long stick, ten feet long maybe, so that when he loses his remote, he doesn’t have to get up to look for it but changes the channels by poking the TV with his stick.”  Everybody laughed.  Who hasn’t felt too lazy to look for the remote.  I don’t know I said, he may be lazy but that’s pretty ingenious too.  “He should sell it,” a student said.

Perhaps they are lazy.  In 2004 the UC did a big survay and report on the UC undergraduate experience (except for Berkeley; it did it’s own study since it doesn’t consider itself part of the UC System).  But the other eight campuses contributed, and they found that the mean number of hours spent by students in class was 14 and the mean number of hours per week spent studying was 12.  So the students spend a total of 26 hours a week on “academics.”  The report noted some variation in academic involvement between the areas of study.  Students in science/math studied the most; students in the social sciences the least.

Twelve hours of study a week doesn’t seem like much to me.  That’s less than two hours a day on average.  One reason for this relatively low number could well be that it is all that is needed to received a satisfactory grade.  Everybody has heard of grade inflation including students.  So that if one attends class and studies those 12 hours, one could pretty easily come out with a B average especially if one is a student in the social sciences or the humanities.

Once I graded a lot harder than I do now.  About 15 years ago some sort of shift took place; my particular institutution began to attract more and more students with very good high school grades.  I gave Cs then, not a lot but some.  But I gave it up because I saw  that for these students getting a “C” was a failure.  I remember one student going off about how his parents had spent 12000 dollars a year to send him to private school and here he was in college getting Cs.  He didn’t know how he was going to explain that to his parents since he couldn’t explain it to himself.

For a while I tried to hold the “C” line but the Cs seemed to panic the students so much—especially one in the only course required of all students—that they were rendered pretty much unteachable.  They wanted to know EXACTLY what to do to get an A.  Unfortunately, I don’t know a way to tell people EXACTLY how to write well; the more I tried the more I ended up writing the paper for the students.  That was counter-productive and exhausting.

I speculate that grade inflation went along with either the lack of will or means by which to distinguish levels and degrees of quality.  Increasingly students who did the work, no matter what the quality of the work, did well, while those who didn’t do the work, whatever the quality of what they did do, didn’t.  I don’t know when this started but since,  as Hegel says, the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, I would suggest  some time before the publication of Pirsig’s abstruse musings on quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1973).

The horrible twenties

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A fair number of the students I teach may then not know why they are in college (having given really no thought to it).  They are just there, as that student put it, in a kind of robotoid state on automatic pilot not wanting or seeking any larger or greater purpose to their situation than to get boschthrough it with as little strain and as quickly as possible so they can get onto whatever the next step is supposed to be.  

Once upon a time I used to give the students a you-really-don’t-know-what-you-have-got-speech.  College, I would say, that’s nothing.  College is a snap.  For all the talk of being stressed out, you are walking on the sunny side of the street.  College—you will look back upon its horrors and terrors—once you get out there into your 20s—quite fondly.  You have not been to hell—I pour it on—until you are in your 20s.

Have you even thought about it?  About getting a job?  And finding out it sucks?  Or getting a job and then losing it and having to move back in with your parents?  26 years old and living with your parents?  Can you imagine that?  It’s enough to make you get married to the wrong person, no less?

So as you round the curve towards 30, you will have probably gone through a couple of jobs, a couple of relationships, and maybe a marriage.  Possibly along the way you will have become addicted to something and had to go through detox.  You will have contracted herpes or venereal warts.  If you are a woman your butt will have started to sag and if you are a man your gut will. If you are lucky, you will have a job you can at least stand, no children, and not buried up to your necks in debt.  Because this is America.  It’s dog eat dog and devil take the hindmost.

You haven’t seen shit yet.  I pray for your sake that your parents have the money to help you buy a house because you won’t get one otherwise, and oh, you should call your parents tonight and make sure they have taken care of their old age because the last thing you want is to feel that you have to take care of them at about the point you are trying to send your two irresponsible ungrateful brats off to college.

I stopped giving that speech though because all it seemed to do was bleak them out.  They would sort of sit there with their mouths agape.  Sometimes I wonder if anybody has ever bothered to talk to them straight.  Tell me I am wrong, I said, tell me I am wrong.  But they couldn’t.  And from stuff I started to read I realized I wasn’t making it up.  I was too close to the truth. 

Articles were appearing, informed by the ruminations of concerned sociologists, about how many young people had to go home after college.  Getting that first and last months rent together, plus a cleaning deposit, plus trying to keep the car going and having suitable clothes for work or the job search—well, students had to reply on my ma and pa for continued support.  And the idiot sociologists were concerned that this move back to ma and pa would interrupt or somehow distort the life process of young people.

I call the sociologists idiots because it was clear to me in 1985 that adolescence had been prolonged into the late 20s and early 30s.  We have come a long way from Rousseau who pegged adolescence as lasting six weeks.

 

Procrastination is your Friend

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I continue to pinch, poke, and prod, trying to get them to say what they mean more precisely by laziness.  Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son in law, I tell them wrote an essay called the right to be lazy.  He was pro-laziness and saw much potential good arising from it.  I think now of those days back when I was hanging out standing in line at the Seven Eleven and reading a sticker on the back of the Slurpee machine that read: “Don’t just do something.  Stand there.”  Or I say, “regard the lilies of the field neither do they reap nor do they sew…”  Even the Bible praises laziness.

But I can’t seem to get a rise out of them.  I ask well what does it feel like to be lazy.  Procrastination, somebody says.  When I wrote, list three reasons students give for plagiarism, one student wrote:  Procrastination, Procrastination, Procrastination.  I have been hearing students say that for over 25 years.  I procrastinate.  What do you mean by that, I ask.  Well, I am supposed to do something, and I put off doing it, and I do something else instead.

Give students a fancy sounding word and that’s the end of it.  It’s as if the description of the activity (or inactivity) is the cause of it.  I procrastinate because I procrastinate.  At one time, I don’t remember when, this came up so much on one little survey I did that I devised a tiny bit of lecture along the lines of the-how-to-make-procrastination-your friend-model.

Look, I say, procrastination as I see it is not a bad thing unless of course following Aristotle’s golden mean one does it too excess.  But while you are procrastinating you may well be thinking about the thing you are supposed to do and are putting off.  Indeed, you must be thinking about it or you wouldn’t feel you are procrastinating.  In fact, while you are procrastinating you are thinking down in the unconscious; unless of course you are unconscious from having drunk too much.   In this case, you are just unconscious and probably aren’t thinking about anything.

Procrastination may be essential to the unconscious processes involved in the writing of a paper, especially one that might require some self involvement.  You may for example be struck suddenly just as you are going to your computer with the irresistible urge to clean out your refrigerator.  So instead of writing the paper, you straighten out the refrigerator and find all kinds of strange molds and other exciting stuff.  Well, I do exactly that when I am sitting down to write something longer, when I know I am going to be in front of the computer for three or four hours.

I will straighten the refrigerator, or flea comb the cat, or straighten my desk, or delete stuff from my email.  Little household things that I have been putting off for weeks, suddenly occupy my attention.  But you know I do the same thing when I go on any trip.  Even if I am just going off for a week, I try to clean up the place so that when I come back I will have a clean place to walk into.

So you call it procrastination, and I call it getting ready for a trip.  Because writing something can be like going on a little trip.  Your immediate surroundings aren’t there; they go away.  The clock can even go away and when you come back to the clock and your immediate surroundings it’s nice to have things nice.

Dragging My Ass

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If the team at CSI had a department of forensic metaphysics or metaphors, they might be able to declocktect, though the sprinkling of some special metaphysical dust, a long yellow and continuous streak running along the ground behind me wherever I go. This is a complicated and excessively clever way of trying to say that most days, wherever I go and whatever I am doing, I feel as if I am dragging my ass.  The causes for this condition I may or may not further detail, but for now I can say the conditioned has worsened as I have grown older.

Perhaps because of this general condition, these two back to back classes that I am teaching on Tuesday and Thursday this quarter loom on my psychic horizon like a twisted time warp from which I may or may not escape completely in tact.  Maybe I could it at one time, but damn it’s four hours straight of continuous teaching.

I don’t know how the hell or what known criteria was employed that a writing class should be an hour and fifty minutes long.  I remember indeed, at one time, a long ways back, the Tuesday, Thursday classes were an hour and 20 minutes.  And then for some reason, we stopped teaching writing classes on Friday and for whatever reason that increased the class time to an hour and 40 minutes; and then out of nowhere at the command of the people who book the rooms we were ordered to go an hour and 50.

None of this as far as I am able to ascertain has any relation to or was the product of “educational” or “pedagogical” thinking.  No.  It’s all bureaucracy from top to bottom.  For a university class to be a university class, students and teachers are required to have a certain amount of face time or we don’t get paid for the teaching.

Or to take another example, we require students to write approximately 20 pages per quarter in our classes.  Why?  Why not 2 well polished pages or 100 pages?  Make them write like mad fools for a quarter.  The answer to this really unimportant question is that one of the schools in the system is on semester and would not accept our classes for purposes of transfer unless we guaranteed our students write 20 pages a quarter.

How is that for sound pedagogical or education reason?  Not that I know or have any idea how long a writing class should be for ideal educational purposes.  I am inclined to think that most of the learning of a skill like writing occurs outside of the classroom.  Giving some sort of lecture on the comma splice and then having students do exercises on the comma splice for an hour and 50 does nothing at all.

But maybe, at two in the morning, some students looks at what they have written and sees that they have constructed a paragraph that is a page long and that I the teacher have suggested that such paragraphs usually can be broken into smaller parts.  And they look and, what do you know, it can be broken into smaller parts, except for this part which is two small and thus has either to be dropped completely or elaborated upon.

In any case, I have reached the conclusion that a writing class that’s an hour and fifty minutes long is very far from ideal.

PT and Ice

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(RECAP:  I have made it to the classroom, hooked up every thing and am reminded of the heft of my new laptop that I bought exclusively for educational purposes.  I don’t like carrying it in my over the shoulder bag because it hurts my weakened left rotator cuff.)

propermanAt present my left rotator cuff is worse than my right rotator cuff.  That doesn’t make sense because I am right handed and my right rotator cuff has had much more wear and tear.  But it hurts too though not as bad as the left.  The left was waking me up at night.  I would have to roll over onto the left shoulder to make the pain go away.  That doesn’t make sense either.  But I didn’t care.  If it disturbs my sleep, I tend to it.  That’s all there is to it.  I fancy my sleep and will brook no loss of it. 

The doctor, after I got the x-ray, said I had a calcium deposit and probably something more, but of course x-rays don’t show soft tissue.  He recommended PT and ice.  That was cool with me.  So far I have never spent a day in a hospital and I have never had any part of my body “under the knife” (excepting that cancer in my lip that had to come out).  It’s not that I don’t trust doctors; I just don’t believe they know what they are doing. 

I prefer to treat the problem; at least I know what I am doing to myself.  For example, I decided to skip PT and went on line and found the exercises I should do, and I iced and the pain has subsided significantly.  Such injuries—the general result of wear and tear and skeletal instability that comes with old age and creaking joints—I have found can be very easily re-aggravated. 

In light of the tonnage of my new laptop, I decided therefore that I had to abandon my trusty over the shoulder book bag.  I use a book bag for about 6 or 7 years and then I have to throw it away because I have spilled too much coffee into it or some candy melted and everything got all sticky or the cap came off the sunscreen.  This bag has at least a year more in it, but I go to Staples and I buy one of those bags on little wheels that people pull around behind them usually at airports.  But where I work many of my female colleagues use these to lug stuff to and from classes, especially laptops and the like.  So I got a pretty sturdy one for 99 dollars with a space in it for a laptop and all sorts of pockets for this and that.

The only problem with the bag is that, up to the present moment, while I have seen many women pulling these things behind them, I have yet to see a single male with one.  I knew this when I bought the damn thing.  But thought I was secure enough in my masculinity to non-conform in that particular way.  I should have known I would have a problem when I told the clerk or assistant (or whatever they call the person who takes your money these days) that I was buying it for my wife.

I feel like a wimp pulling that little cart behind me.  I should be a proper man and lug my stuff up off the ground.  So when I see somebody I know, I grab my shoulder and groan as they walk by so they will know I am physically injured and am using this cart device only as a temporary measure while I regain my appropriate masculine strength.  And sometimes for good measure, I throw a limp into it so they will think I am nearly physically incapacitated.  That’s easy to do since my left knee always has a slight ache going.

How long I can keep up this pretext, I don’t know.  In my heart of hearts I fear this little cart thing is permanent and I will never regain my proper masculine strength.

Laptop

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(RECAP:  I have managed to get everything hooked up but realize that the data projector may not have any sound.  I have decided to pretend, when no sound comes out, that the people over in AV are all screwed up.  I am able to see my “desktop” projected onto the screen behind me by the data projector, but it has disappeared from my laptop.  It is, thus, very difficult to get the little arrow to go where I want it to go so that I might open the media player to play the CDrom and produce no sound.)

 As I attempt to manipulate the little arrow by looking at the screen behind me because I can’t see it on the blank screen of my laptop, the students titter at my discomfiture.  I complain that this is a new laptop and I am not yet used to it.  Also I am old.

Both are true.  I am feeling quite old at that moment and the laptop is new.  Indeed, I bought it with my own money for the express purpose of having it for classroom use.  I had grown sick and tired of the one I had been checking out from the writing program.  It was at least five years old, and I don’t know what it is but something goes haywire with a computer that’s five years old.

It’s like it has lint in its system or something.  Stuff would start popping up on the screen from out of nowhere.  Little signals saying it wanted to download something or I was supposed to do something, or in the middle of things it would start checking its disk.  Also I was not trusted by the program’s computer person, so I had been blocked from any ability to add something to the computer if I wanted to or to try to repair something if I wanted to do that.

 The students used the laptop for oral reports and they would want to show something but couldn’t because the laptop didn’t have something on it, and the screen would say download this but they couldn’t and I couldn’t either.  Also I had grown sick and tired of going to the computer person and asking her to help me.   That was her job, I thought, but everything I walked in, she would give me this look and say, “Oh, Nick, what have you done now.”

After about 8 years of this treatment, the computer person began to get under my skin, and I was rude to her on a couple of occasions.  Well, rude for me, anyway.  Which isn’t all that rude.  But I apologized anyway.  And we made up, I guess you would call it, and did the hugging thing.  I guess people just don’t see how terribly sensitive I really am.  And then, just when we had gotten comfortable enough with each other to be rude and then make up (sort of like family), she up and went and got a better job.

Anyhow I didn’t want to do that anymore or not be able to download stuff to the computer if I wanted to, so I went out and bought a laptop so I could be in charge of it.

I went to a PC Club not far away and said all I was interested in was the ratio of money to power or, in other words, what was their most powerful laptop for the least money.  I was not interested in features, add-ons, extras, or any of that crap.  I wanted raw power.  So that’s what I got from a computer manufacturer that I had never heard of and a type that they were going no longer going to carry.  In short, the last one of its kind on their shelf.

I got lots of power for about a thousand of my own dollars to be used in the education of my ungrateful and unappreciative students.  Unfortunately—I had not paid much attention to it at the time—but the thing weighs a ton.  It’s portable, but in a limited sense of that word.  I have bad rotator cuffs on both shoulders and walking with it to class in my over the shoulder bag just killed me.

But at that moment, I am not so much concerned with tonnage as I am with the fact that I cannot open the “media player” to play the Cdrom for which I have no sound.

Hooking Up

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(RECAP:  I am finally in my classroom and have just attached the data projector to the wall outlet when I realize that the data projector which I have gotten to play the CDrom of a documentary (that will not work in the room’s DVD player) does not appear to have any sound.  I decide when I turn on the CDrom and no sound comes on that I will pretend I am outraged by the failure of the AV people to do their job.  I will curse them roundly.)

 While understanding the ultimate futility of my efforts (i.e. no sound will be produced) for my plan filmprojuectorto work, I must complete hooking up all the apparatus.  Also I have the faint hope that when I play the CDrom magically sound will come out of the data projector.  I remove my laptop from my bag and screw the data projector cable into the back of the laptop. 

I take out the telephone cable that runs from the laptop to the phone jack in the wall by which I can access the internet and my online syllabus.  I see that the cable will not reach the outlet in the wall, so I push the whole table with a screeching sound towards the outlet.  I squint looking at the four outlets.  Why, I don’t know, but only one of them is “active.”  Unfortunately, unless I get down on my knees, I cannot see which one is designated as active.  I ask the student nearest the outlet if she can see which is active and plug the cord in.  This she does with apparently reluctance.  Or perhaps she is just depressed.

I return to my bag to locate the power cord for the laptop.  I cannot find it.  I rummage for a bit.  And give up.  After all I won’t really need it since the sound won’t come on anyway.  I then plug the internet cord into the laptop and turn the laptop on.  The laptop goes on and my “desktop” appears but no light is coming out of the data projector.  I stare directly into its green eye but see nothing coming out.  I ask a student to locate the power button because apparently I have failed to turn it on.  The student does so and I am immediately blind by light from the projector.

Improvising, I pretend to be blinded and stagger about the front of the room for a bit.  But nothing, not even a titter.  Apparently they have no interest in my labors or my antics.  Or maybe they are a really tough crowd.  I will perhaps have to fall flat on my ass or maybe have a heart attack before I get a laugh out of them.  That would be great.  I have a heart attack, they laugh hysterically at my apparent discomfiture.  I die and some of them at least feel guilty.

I return to the desk with the laptop almost tripping twice on the various cords running this way and that.  Clearly now the data projector is working, so is my laptop.  But the image on my laptop is not appearing on the screen.  Instead there is just this big blue square up there with nothing on it.  I remember this having happened before and that to fix it involves the function and the F8 key on the laptop.  I give it a try.  And to my delight my desktop appears on the screen.  But my delight is dampened when I see now that my laptop screen is completely black. 

 My ability to control what appears on the screen is now reduced to zero since I am sitting with my back to the screen and staring at a blank laptop.