Then there was the goth. You don’t see many goth students in business schools (and isn’t goth just too ten years ago?) but I had one. She was always interrupting to go on about the rainforest, or corporate conspiracies, or something.
Now I have a policy: I never bring politics into the class unless I have no choice because of the topic, and then, my students have no idea what my politics are. I found it difficult to stop her from overrunning the class without refuting her nonsense, but I did it.
Anyway, she told me one day she wanted to change cohorts.
“Why?”
“Because I have nothing in common with those people,” and the way she said those last two words, she could have been spitting. I found it impossible not to look around the room, noting silently that she apparently had nothing in common with anybody. (By the way, business students are extremely different from your liberal arts student.)
“That’s not a good reason,” I said patiently, “You have to learn to work with people who aren’t like you.”
“But they eat meat! And they’re Republicans!”
“Well, this is the business school.” I wanted to ask her why she was there, but I didn’t.
“And they’re too competitive!”
Anyway, after she went through a long list, ranting about her fellow cohort members’ rationality (which of course bothered her a great deal), I calmed her down and explained that I couldn’t switch her.
A couple of weeks later, her cohort came up to talk to me after class. Apparently, they wanted to meet on Fridays or Saturdays, and she couldn’t because she had to go to her pagan coven thing. They wanted to meet at a pizzeria, but she couldn’t because she was allergic to half the things they used and anyway, they served meat and she was a vegan. They started meeting at each member’s room, but when it was her turn, she wouldn’t let them because they would destroy her Mother Gaia room aura with their impure Repug vibes. And when they did get her to meet with them, they couldn’t get anything done, because she would do nothing but rant and rave about their evil business corporate lackey-ness.
They had to give midterm presentations, and when it was her turn, she didn’t say one word about their project. Instead, she went on about the rainforest and earthworm rights and world peace and justice and evil corporations.
Black nails, blue-black hair, black clothes, black scowl. An unhappy child and worthy of sympathy, no doubt, and however much she contributed to the “diversity” of my classroom, she was a pain. However, the point at which I had just had enough was when in class I heard her say, quite loudly, “How would you know! You have a penis and you’re not disenfranchised!”
I am not a big fan of students talking about penises or other anatomy in my classroom. Call me a prude, but I just feel it isn’t appropriate. And as I approached her cohort, they broke into a loud argument.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to resolve it. The midterm was the night before, and she’d failed it. She dropped the class.
Wyatt Earp says:
Thank God!!! Could you imagine if she passed the exam? More months of grief. You’d be hitting the bottle pretty heavily by now!
November 21, 2005, 7:29 pmrightwingprof says:
Yes, she would have driven me nuts. She had trouble with math, so that pretty much did her in.
November 21, 2005, 7:56 pmrtw says:
Hey…not all goths are bad! I happen to be a right-wing, God fearin’ (so fearin’!) GOTH! She’s just a hippie-freak with black hair. Oh….and I am not a witch. Even a walk through New Hope gives me scary chills. I’m a teacher, and I have had the same thing happen, only it was a parent calling his child. When told school was still in session and that I was the teacher he said, “I don’t think so.” I saide, “Uh, I think so.” I then hung up on him. Dork! Do you have the same problem with laziness, arguing every little grade, and excuses I do? I guess you don’t get the parents emailing and calling to make a zillion excuses for their kids, though. Oh…then there are the threats of, “I’m a lawyer,” or “As an educator, myself (blah, blah, blah). Thanks for your post.
November 22, 2005, 4:44 amrightwingprof says:
Yes, I do. I was at a state education seminar and was talking to a principal and this came up. She was amazed that I got the phone calls about little Billy.
These kids get their sense of entitlement from their parents, after all.
November 22, 2005, 7:18 amRight Wing Nation » Blog Archive » Fixing Flawed Ideas: IIb says:
[…] We did have a few rare instances of nutball students creating problems, but for the most part, the problems took care of themselves. […]
May 12, 2006, 12:47 pmRight Wing Nation » Blog Archive » Navigating The Group Work Maze says:
[…] Granted, this was not a perfect system. There were a handful of groups that could not agree on percentage assignations. We had a few cases where one member of the group was intensely disliked by the others (sometimes for very good reason, like Miss Goth Witch), and was screwed by the group. And we had a small number of cases where a group contained one or more control freaks that insisted on redoing every other member’s work, then taking credit for it. In these cases, we stepped in and acted as judges. […]
September 19, 2006, 12:09 pm