In my dim recollection of school, I was one of the people who sat at the back of the class and I only tried to communicate with the person directly in front of me. The one exception was Physics, but that was because Mr. Harp was awesome. He looked precisely like every man in every Herman comic strip and was easily a billion times funnier. I wanted to sit close enough to hear everything he mumbled.
Anyways, there were times that I knew the answer to the question the teacher was asking ("Anyone? Bueller?"), but I almost never spoke up. I never really understood why teachers would ask the students. Weren't we supposed to be learning from them? Surely they knew the answer. And they were getting paid to make sure that knowledge was passed on to us. Waiting for some smarty-pants to blurt something out - right or wrong - was a waste of time. And I don't recall that it achieved any kind of class unity or even competition. Did the less knowledgeable students want to become more like the brown-nosers? I doubt it. And it certainly didn't make the ones with the answers more popular.
The reason I'm thinking about this now is that I'm paying money to take a class. It's not only different being in a class because I want to be, it's also different being in class as an adult. But I still never ventured an answer or even asked a question in my first class. I was telling a friend about how the guy sitting beside me was asking every single question that went through my mind and how happy that made me when my friend pointed out that I should be asking questions if I have them. I'm paying for the class; I should be trying to wring out every penny's worth from it. And I may as well answer the questions that the teacher poses - why wait? Just answering the damn question might give us an extra few moments to learn something.
And so here's how that went:
I'm still wondering what it was he thought I said. I'm pretty certain that I said exactly the same thing as the "right" answer, just with a different HTML character as an example. Did he hear the sound of muted trombones while my lips were flapping, à la Charlie Brown cartoons? Did he think I said "Itsy wand Caligula's Gattaca titties, dude. Amp or sandwich, tea some colon"? Is that why he looked so disappointed? I mean, he does have an accent. Perhaps his listening skills are a bit weak when it comes to English.
Well... either way, I went back to keeping my mouth shut. Except for when I noticed he had made mistakes. Then I spoke up.
* Note that I can't really show you what it looks like because this is HTML and it de-entitizes it back into the single character when it displays it!
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