The coolest prof, ever . . .
So, this term I had a class with 13 people in it, which is rare, even for a senior year bio class - probably due to the 8:30 timeslot. Strangely enough, though I am definitely no morning person myself, this was the class that I rarely missed. Well, I guess you could say that I missed the first 5 to fifteen minutes of almost every class, but I was the meat of it.
Why this out of character behaviour? Usually I can only make early appearances if I have made a promise to someone other than myself. At my summer job, I am very well known as the queen of the last minute rush. Despite honest attempt at showing up early to match my interest in making serious moolah, the best I can do is to be mostly on time. This feat is managed by dressing, showering, driving/drying hair/eating, parking and finally sprinting for the gate at remarkable speed, if I do say so myself. And frankly, despite all sorts of plans to arrive on time for class (or arrive at all, for the boring ones), without the promise of a paycheck, the snooze button simply cannot be conquered*.
So my dedication to this class stems from the prof being such a cool dude. Not that he is actually cool, mind you – his charm rests in his total understanding that he will never be trendy or up on the newest fads, EVER. He told us how, when he heard his children talking about Sonic the Hedgehog, he was excited to think they were learning about the SonicHedgehog gene in elementary school, totally unaware that the game came first. He does impressions of other Evo Devo researchers, ineptly attempting a deep southern accent to say “Gastrulation is the most important action in your life – if you couldn’t gastrulate, your asshole would be at the back of your neck!” Basically, his enthusiasm and his cheerful gawky attempts to get us thinking about his subject win us over.
He really wanted us to work through the concepts, and he managed to get half the class to join in discussion (a minor miracle, when there are no marks attached) by not making us feel bad if we hared down the wrong path – though he didn’t try to validate a wrong answer either. And if he got something wrong, he would fix it immediately without excuses. Of course, one day he couldn’t fix the powerpoint machine, and said that he would have to lecture as he did back in the dark ages. Without his detailed figures it took him longer, and he must have found it irritating, because he said that next time the machine died, he would just do an interpretive dance instead.
I wasn’t the only one who stored an mp3 on my laptop in hopes of catching him out on this one, because someone else must have asked him if he could do that for the end of class. On our last day, he told us that though he considered an interpretive dance for us, it just wasn’t going to happen. He did say that he considered what he could do, and after tossing the idea of turning the course summary into rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, he came up with a plan.
We started to stir in our seats. He said how his eldest son had caught him rehearsing, and shook his head with the words “Dad, don’t mess with things you know nothing about”. One of the students laughed, and said, “what is it, a rap?” The prof had already turning a delicate shade of tomato. “Yes, and you will have to help me with it, it’s not my forte”. And he was right, it was not his forte. He really needs to keep his day job, because his sense of rhythm is not going to get him a record deal, despite some ingenuity in finding rhymes to the tune of ‘archenteron’ and ‘gastrulate’. I don’t think cardigans and pleated khakis are going to make it onto MuchMusic anytime soon either.
So he ran a beat with his laptop, and started up his powerpoint . . . the screen had like five rhyming couplets on it, and it really was a summary of the first course section. We tried not to laugh too hard, as he stumbled gamely through it. Some of us even made appropriate rap background effects, though none of us could collect ourselves enough to join in. When he cued up the second screen without missing more than another half-beat we laughed harder, and every time he continued onto another rap section we tittered with amazement. The thing was almost as long as ‘American Pie’, and he managed to get through the whole course without expiring of embarrassment or lack of breath. We clapped like crazy, and I asked him to post it with the course materials. After he left and we did his teacher evaluations, we all agreed that it was the coolest thing a prof had ever done for us. And here he thought he would never be cool at all.
*Re the snooze button having me whipped - this is not to say that I haven’t tried, you understand. I have worked out various schemes to attempt a morning routine that doesn’t involve me doing an imitation of that Ice Age character, Scrat. (Think panting, scrabbling, unlikely aerobatic feats and rampant desperation). I have taped stuff over the snooze button, I have hidden my alarm clock, I have begged my roommate to throw water on me (she threw her cat instead) . . . but somehow I was still able to deal with all these things without waking up. It appears to be genetic.
posted by Lu Hill at 10:57 a.m.
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