TRUE STORY.

-------------------

There are some teachers who you never forget because of the impact that they had on your life.  Then there are some teachers you want to forget the moment you walk out of their classroom for the last time.  And then, there are the teachers who you remember for the moments that they did something so outrageous, so incredible, that you just have to do one of two things: tell everyone you know or write a story about it.  This is the story about Dr. Joel King, the Child & Adolescent Development professor at the University of Maine at Farmington.

There is always a hint of sarcasm, a twist of irony, in every story Dr. King tells.  He likes to portray himself as narcissistic and pessimistic, but he’s really not.  Whenever he says anything, he looks completely confused about what he is saying, like he can’t believe that it is coming out of his mouth.  He pauses every once in a while and shakes his head slightly, as if his anecdotes are completely unbelievable.  He is a man of average height and weight, with round glasses and curly gray hair.  He likes to wear button-up t-shirts, usually plaid, neatly tucked into pair of nice pants, and a belt to match his shoes.  He usually holds one hand by his side and the other halfway in the air, as if he is shrugging with one arm.  The whole appearance can be rather comical.

Dr. King likes to talk about his daughters.  The day on which this story occurs is no exception.  According to Dr. King, one of his daughters is absolutely magical with words.

“And Heather bent down for the ball.  Now, the runner is running normal speed, remember.  And Heather is going… Heather speed.  And everyone is completely silent.  They can’t believe what’s happening.  Then my nine-year-old daughter calls out, in the dead silence—‘Heather!  My clothes are going out of style!’  She just had the perfect words.”  We all laughed. 

“And Heather picked up the ball”—he bent down and straightened up in slow motion—“and threw a perfect ball.  It was perfect.  It just arrived about five minutes too late.  Everyone had packed up and left, the other team was already on the bus back.  It was a great throw, just too late.”

This is how Dr. King always tells his stories.  He likes to exaggerate the details—according to him, “Heather speed” was just about equivalent to watching a slow-motion video.  He once told his class that a child shot himself because the child thought an airplane was small and his mom told him the big metal thing at the airport was also and airplane.  He enjoys morbid details.

He continued on to tell the class that he had a professor when he was in college named Professor Frymark.   According to Dr. King, “there are people who are a young old, and then there are people who are… old old.  Professor Frymark was old old.  There was a rumor that he had died five years before I got there, that’s how old he was.”

Dr. King had to write six essays for Professor Frymark’s class.

“I got twelve words on those six papers.  Six ‘good’s, six ‘ideas’.  Good ideas.  Good ideas.  Good ideas.  That’s all I ever got.  My way of writing consisted of two rules.  One, use really big words.  It makes you sound smart.  You have no idea what you’re saying, but you sound smart.  Two, use really long sentences.  If it’s longer, there’s got to be something good in there somewhere, right?  I got B minuses on all my papers.

“So you know how you can get anything you need for an essay in any ten random pages from the book?  You just open up to a random page and read the five pages before it and the five pages after it, and you’ve got all the material you’ll need to write the paper.  Don’t tell Erica over here that, she’s in senior seminar, she shouldn’t know that.  Anyway.  So you know how when you want to study, but you don’t really?  Studying is holding the book in your hand.  When you want to study, you go to the dorm lounge with the other people who don’t want to study, and you can sit down and chat.  Holding the book doesn’t really get in the way.

“So I was in there, not studying, and there was a Creative Writing major in there.  I’d never met one of those before.  And he’d had Professor Frymark.  First, he asked me if he was dead.  Then he wanted to see my paper.  He looked at it and he laughed at me.”

Dr. King’s problem, according to the Creative Writing major, was that he tried to write about the whole book in a five-to-seven page paper.

“You’re supposed to focus on one idea,” the guy said.  “And use short sentences.”

“See Spot run,” Dr. King told the class.  “Hard to mess that up.

“So I figured I’d give it a try, I mean, what did I have to lose?  The only thing that changed was Professor Frymark dropped the s.  It said ‘good idea.’”

This ridiculously long story that started with his daughter and ended with his good essay ideas actually had a purpose, however.  Dr. King meant to show us how to write our papers on our psychology articles, and somehow his life history was tied to this knowledge.

Now is probably a good time to mention that I was in this class, and I witnessed the next horrifying event myself.  I would call what happened next an English major’s nightmare.  I wasn’t paying attention at first; I was too busy writing song lyrics.  I did, however, catch that Dr. King was telling us how to write our essays.  I managed to look up as he switched the slide to show us what our introductory paragraphs should look like.  I don’t remember the topic, but I do remember the basic layout of this piece of horrifying narrative:

“The purpose of this paper is to discuss such-and-such.  This is how I will do so.  First, I will do this.  Second, I will discuss so-and-so.  Third, I will talk about this.  Finally, I will conclude by discussing this.”

I could believe this display of words so appallingly arranged on the screen.  I looked to Dr. King.

“Do you want us to write like that?” I asked incredulously.

Dr. King looked at me with a smile. “Sure, if you want to,” he said.  He then addressed the whole class.  “I know that some of you who are gifted in language could not start an essay like this without throwing up on the paper, and that would be pretty nasty.  But for those of you who really can’t write, this is fine with me.”

I stared at the offensive paragraph on the screen, my mouth agape and my eyes wide.  I had not written such a blunt, poorly written paragraph since the fifth grade.  And he was endorsing this… mediocrity?

He continued on, and much to my horror, it only got worse.

“This is what your conclusion should look like,” he said.  He clicked his little button, and the only thing on the screen that changed was the word INTRODUCTION at the top, which now said CONCLUSION.  I could not rip my eyes away; it was too terrible.  He clicked his button again.  The first “will” changed to “did”.  He clicked twice more.  The next two “will”s changed to “did”s, as well.  I was in shock.

“And the final touch…” he clicked the button of doom one last time.  The concluding sentence changed from “Finally, I will conclude by discussing…” to “Finally, to conclude…”

I wanted to shoot myself.  It was like being in the fifth grade all over again.  How could a college-level class be accepting of such terrible writing?  My face still expressed my initial horror; my eyebrows were furrowed, and my jaw was as low as it could be without falling off.  I felt like a part of me was dying inside.  This had to be a crime.  There was absolutely no way that this type of writing could be allowed in a university, especially in 200-level psychology classes.  And yet, there it was.  Dr. King watched my face in amusement.  He didn’t care too much.

“All right… please leave, everyone,” he said.  “Oh, wait, I have your tests.”

I prayed for my test to be near the top, prayed.  I had to leave the room of the offensive-yet-acceptable paragraph.  No such luck.  Mine was so near the bottom that I was almost the last one to leave.  I was in agony.  Dr. King handed me my test, finally; I shoved it in my bag and rushed out of the room, my face still contorted in disbelief.

I knew then that I was a true lover of the English language.  Such a butchering of the art of language hurt me down to my very soul, and I could not believe that my eyes had witnessed such a horrible sight as that sample paragraph in a college setting.  I resolved to write a flowing, well-written essay, not a mockery of the English language itself.  I prayed that no one else would consider such a paper acceptable, but as Dr. King said, not everyone is a writer.

I do not know how the essays turned out for that class, as they have not been turned in as of today. I am so grateful that I am not the one reading them.  I haven’t written my essay yet.  In fact, I should probably be working on that instead of writing about my professor’s crime against my beloved English.  I’ll let you know how it ends.

*NOTE* This is a little weird... it kind of wrote itself.  IDK.

---

Tap, tap, tap.

 

She drummed her fingers on the windowsill.

 

Tap, tap, tap.

 

She licked her lips, first the top, then the bottom.  The corners of her mouth felt dry.  She moistened them with her tongue.

 

Tap, tap, tap.

 

Why wasn't he home?

 

She got up and ran her hands over her face with a sigh, as if trying to flatten her features into a blank piece of flesh, to remove expression.

 

What was keeping him?

 

Tap, tap, tap.

 

A car pulled into the driveway.

 

She jumped up and ran to the door, opened it, and arranged herself to look as if she had been very patient, yet worried.

 

She knew where he'd been.  The disheveled hair, the smell of beer on his clothes, the buttons on his shirt one off.

 

Oh, yes.  She knew where he'd been.

 

She hated him.

 

He ambled to the door and leaned down for a kiss; she turned away.

 

He knew that she knew.

 

He knew she hated him for it.

 

Without a word, he turned around, got in his car, and left.

 

She watched him leave.

 

She drummed her fingers on the doorframe.

 

Tap, tap, tap.

 

She went back inside.