Old People On Campus: More tales from the Non-Trad Trenches

If only I could get away with this
sort of behaviour on campus...

So, with just over a month left in the semester, what have we learned?

1. College students are delightful.
Okay, I didn't just learn this. I knew this already. In fact, I've been crazy-spoiled into expecting all college students to be like the kind, thoughtful, reasonably intelligent, engaged, completely-fun students I know from South Plains. Imagine my joy at finding similar people at UT. I haven't given them all nicknames yet, but you may hear more about Sprained Ankle, Moderately Amusing Freshman, More Non-Trad Than Me, Happy Spanish Student, and Free Spirit. They are making my days so much fun.

2. College students are disagreeable.
Quite the contradiction, eh? Fortunately, I've not run across many of the disagreeable sort (although you may remember Annoying Guy; he was on the far side of disagreeable and needs his own category). These tend to be the ones who are more focused on having fun than learning things. These are also the ones who are best-suited to the use of Twitter, since most of them fell the need to announce their mental states to the universe every five seconds. Thank goodness disagreeable students tend not to be writing majors, so I don't have to see much of them. And the disagreeable students do make me so much more grateful for the delightful ones.

3. Not all of my instructors are as wonderful as the rhetoric professors.
I remember once one of my high school math teachers-- whose classroom was next door to a foreign language classroom-- remarking that language teachers are insane. He was not wrong.
I like two of my three Spanish teachers, but the third one-- also known as Crazed Spanish Teacher-- has been the source of about 98.4% of my stress this semester. I changed her class to pass/fail to keep the stress under control, at the strong urging of my husband, who was tired of me coming home discouraged every day.
The most exhausting thing about CST is that she takes everything that happens in class as a personal affront; some of the class didn't have their books bought on the second day of class & she lectured us about that. Some of us (me!) do poorly on quizzes, so she lectures us on that. (I don't know what everyone else's reasons are, but I'm usually still processing the material when we take a quiz. If anything, I see it as an opportunity to find out what I still don't know.) She forgot to attach a review sheet to an email last week, and no one emailed her back for hours to let her know (I hadn't even noticed, because I hadn't tried to download it yet), so she lectured us on that. I. Hate. That. Class.

4. But my rhetoric instructors really are wonderful.
Seriously. God himself must have chosen the rhetoric faculty at UT. There's one instructor at LCU that I wish UT would hire, preferably before I graduate, and then my life would be complete (although I'm fairly certain said instructor is not interested in working for UT... sigh).

5. And I still don't like science.