"I hate the living..."

By: Meradeth Houston on 2:57 AM

Though I totally love MIB. Yes, this is a quote from the movie, though I regularly employ it to describe why I work with dead people. Not fresh-dead and potentially stinky, but long dead and I'm just getting bones and teeth. But, after last night, I'm thinking any dead person would be better than some of the freshmen in my class.

 

The final for ANT1 is coming up tomorrow. It's a giant test, cumulative, and downright terrible. I know it. The other TA's know it. So what did we do, being nice people and all that? We set up an extra review session of course! Last night, three of us TA's took two hours out of our limited free time to answer questions about any of the material that was going to be on the test. Can you see where this is going? Well, apparently, a few of the students weren't so happy about this. One asked if we'd do a lecture instead, covering the material. Well, seeing as how that wasn't going to answer people's questions, and we hadn't put together a lecture (how to you do a two hour lecture on something we've been talking about for ten weeks?), we said no. Got questions? We're here to answer them. The guy got up and left. Whatever.

Now, when I got home last night, I had a lovely string of emails in my inbox, one in particular from this nasty beast of a student, telling us we had done a terrible job, it was completely useless, and to top it off, we were "freakishly arrogant." I about died laughing. Yep, I should have expected it. Apparently the students who came to the review expected us to hand out answers. To spoon feed them what was going to be on the test. Since WHEN is that college? It was never like that when I was in school. It's not like that anywhere I know of. Yeah, I might hand out hints, but I'm not going to tell people about what's going to be on the exam. Sorry.

My favorite part come from the chat room the website has set up. One of the "lovely young ladies" (read: me trying to be nice) decided to comment on us, noting especially the sarcastic TA who sat in back and cackled at people's questions. Part of me is totally hurt. Part of me honestly can't stop laughing at this. Cackling? Oh dear, I wish I could do that better. More people would see it if I could. I did step back for the first part of the session, mainly because the questions being asked were part of the head TA's specialty, and she knew the material better. Any laughing on my part was joking with the other TA that we didn't know the answer. Later on though, I got to field all the questions pertaining to genetics and cultural/biological variation, which are my areas. Currently, I'm tempted to email the chick and let her know that hey, guess what, I did read what she said. It would be Oh SO Satisfying!

Okay, this is the end of my vent. I needed to get it off my chest. Some students really just need to learn that this is the real world, and you have to work for what you get. Until they realize that, keep their damn mouths shut!