Student Tales

Yesterday as I walked to class I saw one of the university's illustrious students being led away in handcuffs by a burly officer-type. The student was protesting, "But sir, I have an exam in my next class!"

The officer said, "Well, you're gonna miss it."

It wasn't one of my students, fortunately....at least, I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Some of them look kinda alike to me. But still, it's just another of those little reminders that when you have 120-plus students per semester, some of them are going to be, well, a little off.

As faculty we periodically get little memos from the counseling people (always a useless lot) on how to handle nutty students. There are a variety of set phrases you're supposed to use, of course. But basically it all amounts to the same thing: Run. Quietly, imperceptibly if you can, so that the student doesn't fully grasp the fact that you're running.

But run. And tell everyone else to run, too.

I haven't personally had any dangerous students that I know of. There was, of course, the born-again Christian guy who missed class one day, misunderstood whatever he had been told the lecture had been, and came to yell at me at length about what he hadn't heard the next day. I thought he was a little nutty (as I casually called security). But mostly when I meet nutty students they're just so far out in their invented worlds that I have little concern that anything will ever be actuated here on the planet.

My favorite was the woman who missed a midterm exam. It was a smallish class, so I noticed her absence. I figured she'd dropped the class, and sure enough, I didn't see her for several weeks after that.

But then she showed up again, and waited around after class to pick up her "exam."

"But you didn't take the exam," I said.

She swore she had. She told me an elaborate story about what she did before and after the exam: the lost sleep, the worrying about it afterwards to her colleagues at the job, what she told them, what they were wearing when she told them, etc.

It was a very elaborate story.

So elaborate, in fact, that I became rather concerned and decided to let her make up the exam rather than have to dwell in her fantasy any longer.

So she took the exam after all, long after the original date, failed it anyway, and of course it all ended up where it should have all along.

But you see?

Sometimes these people can be quite odd.