Category Archives: The University

Data Projector

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(RECAB: After having gone to the bathroom and picked up the data projector and having forgotten the number of my room and having numerous flashbacks that I have to write about, I have finally manged to write myself into the room that is full of annoying sophomores.  I am after all my anxiety approximately 3 minutes late.)

I enter the room pushing the  damn data projection cart ahead of me.  It is not a grand entrance.  I say I am sorry I am late, but nobody says anything back.  Not:  Oh, that’s ok; or glad you are here; or go fuck yourself. Zip.

I manage to turn the cart and angle it towards the seats.  I say that I will have to push it back more towards the middle of the room.  I aim towards a gap between the row of seats and push in that direction.  But nobody moves.  Scoot over, I say, Come on. They move slowly and with apparent resentment at having to expend the energy to do so.  I unravel the power cord for the data projector and hand it towards a student seated by the projector, but he looks at it like he doesn’t know what a power cord is for.  I am saved by the student behind him who takes it and plug it into the wall socket.  My heart goes out to this helpful student. 

I then take out the cord that runs from the data projector to the laptop.  I screw it into the data projector…and it comes to me in a sudden and horrifying flash that, while I am that day going to show part of a documentary on the consumer society, I am not sure that I have any sound. 

I bought the documentary for 35 dollars off Amazon.  But when I got it I saw it wasn’t a regular DVD as I had thought ibut a CD rom.  Always anticipating technological difficulties, I had gone to my rooms  two weeks before class started and put one of the rom disks into the DVD player that is built into the wall and attached to a TV monitor hanging up there in the air. But the DVD player would not play the CD rom.  

Up to that point I had decided I would just bite the bullet and do without the data projector.  But since the CD rom would not play in the DVD player, I decided I had to use the data projector because I knew that the CD rom would play in my laptop, and if I could connect my laptop to a data projector, I could use that to project the CD rom onto the screen upfront.  The rooms that come with built in data projectors also have speakers in the ceiling.  Until that moment I had not stopped to consider that a data projector that was not built into the room might not have sound attached to it.

terminatorSo far I have managed to enter the room, plug in the data projector power cord, attach the data cord to the data projector, and now I am paralyzed at the thought that, while I have a documentary to show the class, I may not have sound for them to hear the documentary.  I begin to sweat.  All around me is silence.  Frantically, I examine the data projector but can find nothing among all its little buttons indicating the presence of sound.  I feel like just giving up and going home.

But I decide to plunge on.  I will hook everything up, I will take roll, I will tell them that we are going to watch a documentary on the consumer society as part of the material for their first paper, and when no sound comes out of the data projector, I will act as if I am completely shocked and start cursing the people over in the AV department for not giving me the right projector.

I have a plan.  But no sound.

A Raving Pedant

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(RECAP:  I have finally made it to my classroom.  I enter and immediately have an angry flashback about the first time I entered those rooms, found them crammed to the gills with seats, and myself completely immobilized by all the seats up against the blackboard,  Suddenly I think, EARTHQUAKE.)

I have this vision of an earthquake.  I see the students coming at me, a frantic horde, climbing strangeloveover their seats (since there is no room to walk between them) and the doorway of that tiny, jam-packed room completely blocked with a confluence of student bodies all atop each other arms and legs akimbo as that wretched building comes down around our ears.  Since my vision has some basis in reality, so as soon as that class is over, I go to the office and say that the brand new room I just held class in is an earthquake hazard.  Oh, Nick, they go.  Since we writing teachers are not real Professors, but Lecturers, some members of the staff adopt towards us a condescending attitude.  Well, you go over, I say, You look at that room and tell me it is not an earthquake hazard.

When I return to that room a day later, I find that 10 seats have been removed.  I learn that the campus fire marshal has visited these rooms and declared them a fire hazard.  Where the fire marshal was when they put all those seats in there I don’t know.  I feel vindicated.  The room is still too small with no data projector and no cross ventilation.  But I feel vindicated.  Indeed, when I look back, I rank my part in the removal of those chairs one of the high points of my career as a writing instructor.

This is pathetic, admittedly.  But the teaching of writing is a very frustrating business because I never know if I have, after ten weeks with a class, accomplished anything.  Sure, maybe their writing has improved somewhat.  I say maybe because sometimes it’s really hard to tell.  How the hell in any case is one to find a standard by which to judge what improvement might or might not occur over a mere ten week period.

 And unlike a tenured Professor, say, of literature, I see a group of students once and then they disappear.  They do not take a class from me two or three times as they might from their favorite professor.  So I don’t have students coming back to me, bringing me candy, or offering me sexual favors because I was such an earthshakingly wonderful professor and profound guy.  In ten weeks, it’s just not possible to build up that narcissistically informed rapport.  And besides I am teaching writing, not Shakespeare, or James Joyce, or one of those authors that allows me to play the explication guru and act as if I know what I am talking about so that students who don’t have the faintest idea what these authors might be saying come away thinking they have been informed.

I don’t get to talk about tragedy or comedy and love or the nuances of all three.  I don’t get to emote or to display the depths of my compassion or my complex understanding of the nature of human experience or indoctrinate them into the most hip and cutting edge current theoretical fad.  It’s hard to emote over the use of the comma.  I have tried and failed.  Rather than display the depth of my understanding of human nature, I come off sounding like a raving pedant. 

But with those seats and their removal I could see and feel that I had played a role in causing something to happen.

Late for Class!!!!

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I do not think a writing instructor should be late for class.  On top of that, I am never late.  Usually, I am early.  I am incredibly punctual.  Once I began to wonder if my punctuality was obsessive and so forced myself to be late a couple of times going to class.  That was years ago.  But lately I find eucalyptusmyself being late.  Not by much, mind you.  Also I forget things more than ever.  So being late to class has worked me up into complete fiddle-faddle.  Not only am I late, but being late is a sign of my weakening mental condition and insipient senility. For god’s sake, I don’t know how I live with myself.

So rather than roll the data projector along a route that is all sidewalk, I decide to take a short cut.  I take some sidewalk, cut across a parking lot, and reach an embankment.  I was going to go around the embankment but miscalculated.  Going around will go a long way in the wrong direction.

The data projector is strapped down to the top the cart with one of those elastic cords I used to use when I strapped things to the back rack of my bicycle when I rode my bicycle before my neck gave out.  My bag full of stuff is sitting there too on top perched precariously next to the data projector because it is so full of stuff I could not jam it into one of the shelves on the cart.

I would call it a semi-sharp, slightly sloping embankment.  I have walked up it and down it before as part of my short cut, but I have not tried to roll a cart with a data projector down it.  Those damn eucalyptus trees grow along the embankment, and they have dropped their berries or nuts—or whatever the damn useless things are called—all along the embankment.  So going down the embankment will be somewhat like walking over ball bearings.  I am buffaloed.  I have an image of myself lying flat on my back at the base of the embankment with the data project cart lying on top of me and the contents of my bag scattered from here to eternity.

I hate those damn eucalyptus tress; they are a non indigenous import from Australia.  They do not belong in California, but they arrived in the 19th century.  They have stayed and they have proliferated.  They are always dropping shit—their little berries and they shed their skin too.  They make a mess and nothing can live below them because of the toxins they emit.  I consider them a large noxious overgrown weed.

In any case, I decide I must go around the embankment because I don’t want to do myself bodily harm.  I mean, I tell myself, what the hell is the big deal?  Why should you rush and do yourself bodily injury just to avoid being a few minutes late.  What could possibly be the big deal, you idiot, I harangue myself. 

Having managed to subdue, if not calm, myself, I walk around the embankment pulling that loathsome cart and finally get to the side of the building where my class is.  These classes have doors that open out into the air.  There’s a whole row of these classrooms, they all look alike, and I realize I don’t remember the number of my classroom.  To find out what the number is will require that I dig into my bag, plow though its contents—aspirin, batteries, antacids, paper of all kind, pencils, pens, bits of chalk, my coffee container, my laptop, the cords to my laptop and locate the damn piece of paper with the number on it.

I am overcome by thought.  If I was not a stoic and I were in touch with my true feelings, I would go off somewhere and just cry my eyes out.

Sardines

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I know that I am in the general area of my classrooms.  They are right there in front of me.  I say “they” because I have one for my 1-250 class and another for my 3-450 class.  As you can see homer'sbrainthese classes are back to back with a ten minute break between them.  One might think that it would make sense to assign me the same room for the whole period and not give me two different rooms.  But the university does not know how to make sense of anything.

Instead of one room, I have 2 rooms and they are RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO EACH OTHER.  For God’s sake.  And neither of these rooms has a data projector.  So in the ten minutes between the classes, I must urinate, smoke a cigarette, unplug all the stuff I have had to plug in for my data projector to work.  Put all the stuff on the damn cart, and PUSH IT RIGHT NEXT DOOR (for god’s sake) where I have then to plug all that crap back in again to various sockets and outlets.

Just standing there looking at the two rooms—and I am pretty sure I am looking at the two rooms; I just don’t know which one I has my first class—I get pissed off all over again.  A person, clearly a student, comes and stands next to me.  I assume he is in my class since he seems to be standing there aimlessly.  I say, “I don’t know which room it is.”  “Oh,” he says.  Then he spies a woman going in one of the doors and says he thinks she is in the class.  So we go in that door.

Sure enough it appears to be my class.  A room full of annoying sophomores.  Moreover, not a seat is empty.  They are all mashed in there like sardines.  About 10 years ago I walked into one of the classrooms in this building on the very first day it was opened for use.  I almost exploded.  This is supposed to be a university and part of the purpose although apparently a very insignificant part is to educate.

I walk into a place where such education is supposed to occur and find myself in a tiny box.  I have 25 students but there are 35 seats in the room.  The teacher’s table at the front of the room actually touches the desks in the front row.  Between the desk and the blackboard, I find about 2 feet of space into which I squeeze myself.  If I speak too vigorously, I am likely to spit on students who sit in the front row.  

I have to restrain my fury.  Brand spanking new classrooms with no data projectors built into them and so crammed with seats that I can scarcely move.  The students can’t move either.  And this is very troubling since I frequently break them into groups to discuss readings with each other.  Such groups will be impossible in this room because THERE IS NO ROOM TO MOVE.

I am about to have a hernia.  Millions of dollars have been spent building this building mostly for offices for professors and nobody bothered to speak to a teacher about how the classrooms should be set up.  I am freaking dumbfounded.  Not just by the stupidity of it, but by the clear and present indifference of the powers that be—whoever they might be—to the so-called educational mission of the university.

Then I think.  What the FUCK if we have an EARTHQUAKE?

Data Projector

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Having managed a successful visit to that hellhole of a restroom and having gathered up my stuff, I head out to the classroom at a comfortable amble, only to remember when I am half way there that I have forgotten to pick up my digital data projector.  Now I have to go back nearly to where I started, and I must hurry.

I am very unhappy about that.  I have for perhaps 8 years now been attempting to integrate intodataprojector
the classroom the use of digital equipment, a laptop in particular and a data projector.With these two devices I am able to access my on line syllabus, my blog where students make entries about what they have read, special readings I may have assigned, and the web which I use both as a source of information and a subject of analysis. Consequently, I have repeatedly asked the front office to insure that I have a room with a data projector built into it.

In spite of my best efforts however every other quarter it seems I must return to the office and tell them the rooms assigned me do not have a data projector.  I don’t like doing this since doing it might imply that the staff is incompetent or that perhaps I am senile and forgot somehow to tell them once again that I wanted a data projector for my rooms.  This problem is exacerbated by the ungodly turnover in the front office.  So that just when I have managed fully to indoctrinate the responsible party into my peculiar needs they leave for a better job.

 This time, I must say, perhaps I did not get on the problem early enough.  But I didn’t think there would be a problem soon enough.  In any case, the responsible party tried repeatedly but could not get me a room with a data projector.  No sooner had she told me that, than she moved on to a better job.  Now I have to train a new person about my particular needs.  But perhaps since I was one of the persons who interviewed her for her job, she will think I am important and pay attention to my requests.

So I rush back to the AV place to get the data projector I have reserved for my class.  When I get there, the door is closed because it’s the lunch hour, and for a second I think, oh god Jesus no, but then remember if I knock they will let me in.  So I knock and then knock again and finally somebody opens up and I tell them I am there for the data projector I have reserved for my class.  I expect they will lead me to the data projectors and say, here take this one.

But, no.  Everything is written down and you can only take the one assigned to you as if there was some huge difference between the damn things.  I find myself standing there as a rather oafish looking student worker begins to thumb through some pages to find my particular data projector.  I can’t believe it.  You would think the thing would be in alphabetical order and the guy would just go to the page with the first letter of my name on it.  But, no.  Maybe it’s not in alphabetical order or maybe the guy doesn’t know the alphabet.  Because he starts with the first page, looks at it, turns to the next for ten damn pages before he glumly says, “D-15.”  The code apparently for the projector they have assigned to me.

It’s pretty clear I am going to be late to my second day of class.

Environmentally Responsible Urinal

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RECAP:  I am in my office preparing to go to class.  So far I have read my student-evaluations and was bummed by them.  I felt resentful feelings towards those who get high student evaluations and called them ass kissers. I have concluded that I am not cute because I am old. I have decided I have time to urinate before I head out to class. But rather than go to the urinal, I describe my new environmentally responsible trash can. Having completed the description I return to the idea of going to the bathroom.

 

With 15 minutes till the hour, I have time for a pre-class precautionary leak and so head for the previously mentioned male restroom.  I open the door and plunge into pitch black darkness for in wate3rlessaddition to the new state of the art environmentally responsible urinal the restroom no longer has a light switch.  It has a motion detector.  One plunges into the darkness hoping to be detected.  To make sure that I am I make wild gestures in the general direction of the motion detector.

Maybe I am wrong; perhaps it’s not a motion detector because I fail to see how it could detect any motion in that pitch black.  For the restroom is like a closet with no windows.  Perhaps it is a noise detector.  If so waving my arms around in the air is not doing one whit of good.

In any case, the light comes on and I angle around the stall up to the new environmentally responsible urinal.  Unlike any other urinal I have ever known, it does not make use of water.  This does not seem like a particularly stunning environmental break through to me.  The urinal seems to be coated with a super slick surface designed not to retard the flow of urine as drawn downward by the power of gravity towards the outlet hole.  

Unfortunately, the surface does not work. Especially on warmer days and what with no way to get air in the place, the urine adheres to the surface and stinks.  Some of us must have particularly adhesive or thick urine.  In addition, to the frequently fetid odor emanating from the urinal, it appears to have a significant design flaw.  A stream of any significance produces, when striking the super slick surface of the urinal, a ricochet spray effect.

If one leans back a bit, one’s clothes are not in danger of being sprayed.  Unfortunately, the floor is with the consequence that the area immediately adjacent to the urinal is somewhat slick and I worry about slipping and wrenching my wretched right knee. 

I don’t know why I have not contacted the authorities yet about this problem.  I expect I will since I am usually the person who notifies the main office if something is amiss in the mechanics of our environmentally responsible building. For example the big door at the end of the corridor sometimes gets out of alignment and emits a horrible sound like the final squawk of a strangling sea gull. Three of us had to call before somebody came to fix that problem a couple of days later.

I also call when someone has jammed up the toilet.  Usually, they come to fix this more quickly since a jammed up toilet in that little hellhole of a restroom can produce a rather stifling atmosphere.  We are lucky, though, as I said, in that few students use our restroom.  Once, when I was officed in another building, I frequented a restroom that was regularly used by students to throw up before going to class.  Or perhaps upon leaving it.

To be continued

Environmentally Responsible Trash Container

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RECAP:  I am in my office preparing to go to class.  So far I have read my student-evaluations and was bummed by them.  I felt resentful feelings towards those who get high student evalauations and called them ass kissers. I have concluded that I am not cute. I have decided I have time to urinate before I head out to class.

 

I have 15 minutes till class starts and I still haven’t managed to get myself out of the office.  Thankfully, the male restroom is just a couple of steps away; if it weren’t I would have to take all my stuff with me because I wouldn’t have time to get back to my office to get my stuff and then get to class.  Additionally, if I had to carry all my stuff, I know from experience that I might have a hard time getting to my penis to urinate.  

 And at my age you don’t want to be fumbling around with stuff whilst taking a leak.  First you have trashbasketto find the damn thing.  Then you have to be careful not to pee on yourself.  It’s not too bad yet, but I am beginning to have a bit of a cut off issue.  I think I am done peeing but my penis, or more exactly, I believe, my bladder doesn’t seem to know it.  I have a slight aftermath leakage problem.  I need both hands to make sure I shake sufficiently and don’t leave unseemly spotting.

This particular restroom is pretty much reserved for the male members of the writing program.  We rarely have student urinators or defecators because our restroom is off the beaten path.  We are grateful for that.  The restroom has a sink and a mirror and a stall and next to that a brand new environmentally responsible urinal.

For some unknown reason, somebody decided to make our building an environmentally responsible building.  We even got some sort of plague for that; and little signs with some sort of green symbol were posted around when the building was converted to being environmentally responsible.  I have not idea what this means—being in an environmentally responsible building.  But it seems to mean that a special trash container was put in my office.  This container is like a regular trashcan but made of blue plastic with a smaller version of a trash container attached to its lip. 

Apparently, we are supposed to put paper into the big blue plastic bucket.  And garbage, like banana peals or apple cores or other possible rotting material, into the little bucket hanging onto the big bucket.  Unfortunately if you put something heavy, like some old batteries or a dead pencil sharpener, into the little bucket that hangs on the lip of the big bucket, and you have nothing in the big bucket, the big bucket falls over.  I find this annoying, so if the bucket happens to fall over I just leave the bucket lying on its side until I have something to put in the big bucket.

The big bucket doesn’t have a completely open top like a regular trash basket.  Instead it has a blue plastic lid with a long narrow hole in the middle about the length of a width of a piece of 8 by 11 paper.  Apparently, one is supposed to slip the paper into the long narrow hole, and I suppose the hole is long and narrow so that one does not try to put a whole book or magazine into the bucket.  I don’t know why you should not do that.  But clearly the long narrow hole is intended for some particular purpose.  So when I have something that won’t go through the long narrow hole, I just take the whole top off and drop the magazine in it.  That’s what I did with the phone book.

I guess I am not environmentally responsible because usually my environmentally responsible trash can scattered in three parts on the floor.  The lid is wherever I decided to fling the annoying think.  And the little bucket is sitting on the floor next to the big bucket until I can find something heavy enough to hold the big bucket down when I put something heavy in the little bucket.

Hot! I’m not!

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That’s not fair really.  Getting good student evaluations on your teaching is not all a matter of kissing butt.  Students also like good looking teachers.  The guys especially like good looking cutewomen teachers, and the girls like good looking male teachers. I have always considered myself good looking enough.  I mean I don’t have two noses or big warts growing out of my forehead or something.  On the website, rateyourprofessor.com, I am not considered “hot.”  They put a little picture of a chili pepper by your name (indicating if you are hot).  But I don’t have a chili pepper so I am not.

Even if I ever had the potential to be hot, I am not sure I ever was even when younger.  I didn’t start teaching till I was in my 30s, so that might have put me out of the hotness range.  Also I used to sport this big old beard;  so unless a person was attracted to shaggy somewhat ill-kempt types, I doubt if I fell into the hot category except maybe with a few alienated, intellectual types with strong nurturing instincts.  

Somewhat recently, as I remember, I asked my students what “hot” exactly meant.  What actors I wondered were hot.  Mostly the women spoke up and they mentioned names of guys I didn’t know.   A lot of students watched that show called OC, about Orange County, and I think they thought some of the guys on that show were hot.  I don’t know.  I asked if De Caprio was hot; yea maybe they said, but he was sort of old hat.

So I asked when you say somebody is hot do you mean they are, if they are a man, handsome.  They looked a little befuddled.  Then somebody said, hot meant cute, and yeah, yeah, others said in chorus, that was it.  OK. Cute.  One of my least favorite things.  I am not a fan of cute.  I get tired of it really quickly. For me cute is sort of the high fructose corn syrup of appearance.  It’s a really quick, very, very sweet high and then it goes away fast and isn’t all that good for you.

So what was a handsome man, I asked, or a beautiful woman, or were there such things any more.  Or only cute, high fructose corn syrup people?  Well, maybe, they said, handsome was still there.  But it applied, if at all, mostly to old people.  So old people could be handsome but not cute?  More or less, they indicated.  So who would be a handsome actor, I asked, but they didn’t know any, so I let it drop.

But I wondered what this love of cuteness might say about my students.  Were I to attempt a phenomenology of cuteness, it might run something like this.  Part of the appeal of cuteness is its very lack of substance, its transience, one might say.  De Caprio, formerly cute, is now old hat.  Cute is new, and being hot too it cools rather quickly.  Part of the appeal of cuteness is its very faddishness, its come and then gone quality.  Biologically it’s true too.  Cuteness is brief; the face and the body can sustain it for only a very limited amount of time.  Over 25 I would argue cuteness is biologically impossible.  So at the heart, cute is cute because one doesn’t have to work hard to get it and one doesn’t expect to get much out of it either.  It’s a buzz.

Student Evaluations

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I went to my mailbox and found those loathsome teacher evaluations from summer school classes.  I didn’t want to look at them; I had already read the students’ written comments so I numerologyknew my evaluations wouldn’t be so hot.  These were the raw numbers from a computerized form that asked students to respond to two questions.  Rank the teacher for the course; rank the course—on a scale of excellent, very good, good, fair, poor.  So you get a number that can be used to compare your teaching to the teaching of others in the same course.

I hate these scores.  The damage they have done to my teaching and to my development as a teacher is immense and unfathomable.  Unfathomable because fear produces unconscious affects.  You censor yourself.  Things you might have done, insights you might have had, things you might have said get crushed by the fear that doing them, saying them, seeing them might have a negative affect on your scores.  Most tenured faculty members don’t pay any attention to these student evaluations at all.  They don’t have to because they have tenure.

But I have been for 26 years a lecturer.  First I was on one year contracts and then on three year contracts and the central, most significant bit of information used to determine whether I would be rehired or not is those damn student evaluation scores.  These are the most significant thing because ultimately the decision about whether you are rehired or not is made, not by your fellow teachers, but by the administration.  And what speaks most clearly to them is numbers.  A few years back at one branch of the university, the teaching scores of the lecturers were lined up and those who fell below a certain line were fired.  Hired and fired on the basis of numbers generated by the students you taught.

The numbers for the student evaluations for writing teachers are significantly and routinely higher than the numbers for any other classes on the whole campus.  One reason for that is that we teach small classes; the students get to know the teacher a bit and the teacher gets to know the students a bit.  The students appreciate that because in most of their large lectures they are anonymous and the professor might as well be the man on the moon.  The other reason is that sometimes quite consciously and sometimes very unconsciously, we writing teachers want to please the students so they won’t say nasty things about us in their evaluations or give us low scores.

This is a very bad, indeed pernicious situation.  I was surprised to learn over the years that even those instructors who routinely got the highest evaluations of all, sometimes 100% excellent, hated to look at their “scores.”  Maybe they were worried they had not received their usual 100% excellent; or maybe they were worried that they had because they 100% excellent indicated that once again, unconsciously of course, they had managed successfully to kiss the butt of each and every student.

Sophomores As Pre-Mature Cynics

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When a person teaches writing, as I have, for 26 years to students who don’t want to take a writing class and resent being in the same room with people who teach it, I feel you have a right to be crabby.  Or at least to pretend to be.  Actually, I don’t mind the word ubiquitous.  I like the sound of it though I have small occasion to use it.  I just throw that in as an example of a big word.  I really don’t like the word “plethora.”    A person who uses “plethora” is a social climber, the kind of person who might be drawn to word power books as a way of cultivating an enormously inflated vocabulary as a means to intimidate others.

I don’t believe in using big words to intimidate others.  People who do that are vulgar and lacking class. If you want to use language to intimidate others, small words will do.

Of course, though, most students who try to use big works are not using them to intimidate but to imitate the big word users known as professors or teaching assistants.  They are humbly trying to conform but screw up a great deal while trying to do so.

But the deeper problem with my sophomores is not that they are probably average to poor writers rather that average to good.  No.  The problem is the sophomore attitude.  In less than a quarter, many conclude that college is a “game.”  Frequently this is a defensive strategy.  They came into the university thinking they would get A’s with little effort.  I do believe that about a quarter of the students I teach have a straight A average upon entering the university.  But then they don’t get A’s; they get B’s.  And sometimes if they are in the sciences they get Cs.

These students, rather than decide they are perhaps stupid or that their education was perhaps inadequate or that they did not study enough but partyed way too much, decide that school is a game, and if they screwed up, that’s because they have not learned the game.  Learning the game is not the same thing as learning at all.  Instead learning the game is best called working the system.  You simply have failed to make the right connections so you can find out who the easy teachers are or you have failed fully to grasp the technique of saying exactly what the professor wants you to say and no more or no less.  And because you have not figured that out, you study the wrong thing or too much and end up feeling like a social outcast among all those people who don’t seem to study at all but still get As.

Because the idea that college is a game serves as a defense for these people, as a cover up for some vulnerability, they can be quite obnoxiously assertive in their claim that college is nothing but a game with nothing of justice to it.  Such students will sometimes say, “I did not get my money’s worth from your class.”  Or: “Your class was a waste of my valuable time.”

I call these sophomores “pre-mature cynics.”