In the middle of my Don DeLillo seminar this morning, a ceiling light flashed and a very loud alarm sounded.
And sounded and sounded.
“Guess we’d better get out of here,” I said to my students as a colleague popped his head into the room. “Should we get out?” he asked. Yes, said UD. Time to get out.
As we tromped downstairs from the fourth floor, we were joined by ever-swelling masses of humanity.
Everyone was thinking the same thing: It’s effing cold out there.
UD had been discussing the many senses of “plot” in Libra, and she just kept doing that — as they tromped the stairs, as her group gathered around her outside the building, and as they were told to get away from the building! by a security person. Talk, talk, talk. UD never stopped. “At $50,000 a year tuition,” she explained to her class, “I think you deserve seamless instruction.”
She’d brought her little brown leather notebook out with her. She checked her list of recurrent themes in the four novels we’ve so far read and talked and talked and talked. The class talked too.
They let us back in after fifteen minutes and we all enjoyed the feeling of warming up as we reentered the fourth floor classroom. Once everyone got settled, UD started up talking again.
February 9th, 2012 at 2:51PM
sounds like a congruous meeting of subject and event, have you ever considered podcasting your lectures?
February 10th, 2012 at 4:41PM
That’s quite amusing. I’m picturing all classes being taught while students descend stairwells now.
Glad to hear the evacuation was nothing serious, like an “Airborne Toxic Event.”
Perhaps the alarm was triggered by SIMUVAC?
I hope some enterprising student took the initiative to shout “We’re all gonna die!” as if he were in “Underworld.”