#65: "f-"

I think that when we all were little kids some of the most awesome nights we ever had were when we got to stay up past our bedtime. I wanted to know what my parents were doing after I went to bed (it wasn't much) because I was a curious child. Later when I was able to stay up late I did so I could watch Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes. 

When I got to college I really hated all nighters. I'm not that productive late at night, and I'm still not convinced that there are that many people out there that can work hard all day long and continue with that level of quality and sharpness all night. I run out of steam around 2 or 3 in the morning. I think I have students that ran out of steam 2 or 3 years ago.

I never thought I would get into education or teaching in any capacity. For a long time teaching things to other people didn't come all that naturally to me. I was an independent child, I stayed up late alone, and when faced with the prospect of having to do work twice because I had to teach someone else how to perform a task (and have to fix it when they didn't get it the first time), I'd just do it myself.

Yet after having been at Marymount for a year I found myself sitting in my department chair's office asking to be an adjunct professor. I wanted the challenge. I wanted the extra cash and I was willing to do the hustle for it. For the most part it's been a good choice, and one that I hope will one day help me in other pursuits (read: my next job, whenever I can find the damned thing). The students have changed over the years; I find them much quieter now then when I started, and I think they're just more afraid of failing in front of their peers.

We all have had that inspirational professor at one time or another. The one that took extra time helping us understand that difficult concept. The one that helped advise you on the classes you should take and in what order. The one that gave you life lessons in the form of the "this is what I did with my life, do it at your own risk" type thing. 

You might also be like me, and have professors that assigned extremely difficult and time consuming hand drafting projects that kept everyone up all night on what felt like hundreds of occasions hunched over drafting tables. We perpetually lived with pencil shavings in our hair, with the scent of workable fixatif in our noses, and grades of F- on our papers. Seriously, one of my all time favorite professors at W&M used to love to give us F-'s on all sorts of things, call us/inanimate objects/his colleagues 'chicken fucker,' and once at an opening night dinner said to the entire group "I could easily drink you all under the table, but my doctor says it'd kill me. I guess it's a good day to die."

I can only hope to be that epic one day so I can hand out F-'s all night long.