Tip #1. Contrive to get carried off to the hospital. I'm not entirely sure how this principle works, but with one class, at any rate, it has done wonders.
Here's the story. In September (was it? so long ago...) I experienced a severe ache in my left side. At first I thought it was food poisoning, though the pain was not in the usual place; then I was certain I was dying. It came and went on a Saturday, stayed more or less dormant through the Sunday, and then reared up and roared on Monday morning around 5:00 AM (check with my Beloved for precise details).
I suffered and paced and moaned and writhed for about two hours before I felt justified making the world stop and going to the emergency room, where I was given powerful drugs and some sort of scan that determined the source of my agony was a garden variety kidney stone. I was sent home with a treble-shotted pharmacopia, to wait it out. I will spare you the details of the pain, wooziness, the vomiting, and the repeated use of a strainer and simply say: it was one of the worst weeks of my life. Not only because of the pain, but because I was unable to work for three days.
And here's the kicker. My class was told I was in the hospital. When I did not show up for two class periods in a row, they assumed the worst. When I returned to the podium, I don't know if it was the distillation of their collective sympathy for my obvious suffering or whether the residual vicodin in my system made me more simpatico, but they seemed happier to see me, happier to hear what I had to say, more compliant with the requirements of the course, less resistant, less nervous and angstig than before, more friendly. Teaching them is so much more a joy than before the kidney stone (B.K.S) that I don't know why I didn't fake one years ago.
So, how long do you think I can engineer a major medical emergency sometime during the semester before the department grows suspicious?
Friday, November 6, 2009
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1 comments:
This may not work with every case, though. My brother Adam had a teacher who told of a time she had a terrible class. She faked a broken leg (complete with cast and crutches) to try to get sympathy. Instead they made fun of her and tossed paper airplanes around all day, knowing that she wouldn't be able to stop them.
However, I think that the real root of this change is you have broken that aura of super-humanness that sometimes surrounds a teacher. You have proven to your class that you are indeed mortal and prone to weakness. You have stepped way beyond the podium and allowed them to see you as a human.
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