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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

You don't want ...


... another description of university students taking a midterm exam, do you? Recall that UD has already written a poem (see UD , 5/4/04) and a little prose piece (see UD, 10/14/04) for you while doing what she's doing now: sitting in front of a group of undergraduates and watching them take a midterm.

But UD has nothing better to do for the next fifty minutes. So let's see if she can find something new to say about this classic scenario.




UD will of course never be able to top Vladimir Nabokov's description of the university examination room:


...I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the
getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce's Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s --
without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenin, respectively, makes sense.

For some reason my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students -- unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden knowledge.

Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: "Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that ...? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?" The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustle arising simultaneously, the majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time's up.




But perhaps UD's midterm posts can be seen as modest contributions to the subject...

UD will get the less attractive elements of the setting out of the way first:

1. Great hacking phlegmy groans.
2. Cell phones.

Moving on, there's the reliable blackness of it all: black tees, black sweats, black blouses, black turtlenecks. If glasses, black glasses. If watches, black bands. If hats, black hats.

One woman's wearing a charcoal tee with GODDESS written on it. Another has a spectacular tan (spring break, Cancun). One male student has brought not a pocket dictionary but a thesaurus, which impresses me. Yet another student has brought, instead of a dictionary, a book of words you're allowed to use in Scrabble. "This is useless," he says to me on his way out.