(Note to newcomers: if you got here by googling certain anatomical terms, the following post is going to be a serious disappointment to you. Might as well click away now, before you waste your time.)
While working to cheer me up after I found out that a certain Dream School had chosen not to interview me,** friend and fellow blogger S. e-mailed me a funny story from her classroom this week. I won't go into details, because it's not really my story, but the upshot of it was that it was a moment when unintentional physical comedy worked because the professor in question was happy to laugh at her own foibles. And it reminded me of a recent time that something similar happened to me. I shared it with her, and now I'm going to share it with you now, in case you needed a bit of light comedy to take your minds off of papers, bluebooks, presentations, or the impending interview season.
Background: I have, this semester, possibly the best class I've ever taught: small (19 students), smart, and all but three of them are constantly popping up with discussion. We hit it off well from the first week on, so it was a great semester. And the fact that I'm a complete dork as a lecturer, and can laugh at my own dorkiness, seems to work.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, I got off onto some tangent or another regarding the medieval Mediterranean, and decided that I needed to draw them a map to illustrate. Now, I'm a rotten artist, but you can usually figure out what my freehand maps are, especially if I say helpful things like "that's France" while I'm drawing. So I start in the west, draw the eastern coast of Spain, then up to southern France, then a blobbish peninsula for Italy, then kind of half-circle around the eastern Mediterranean, then back across for North Africa. I get halfway into the next sentence in whatever point I was making when I suddenly realize that one should be a bit more than vaguely representational when drawing Italy, because it looks like I've just drawn a giant penis on the board. "Now that just looks bad," I say, and they laugh. "I'd better clarify that." So I pick up the marker again and draw another couple of small blobs off the tip of "Italy", and say, "There. Sicily and Sardinia. That should be better." But even as I say it, I (and my students, who begin laughing even harder) realize that all I've done is to draw what can only be described as... well, puddles, off the tip of my all-too-phallic map. "Oh, crap -- that's even worse, isn't it?" By this time, I'm getting students desperately shouting out, "Make it a boot! Make it a boot!" Which I do, and it looks marginally less obscene. Even so, I had to let myself laugh for a full minute or so, then take a couple of deep, cleansing breaths before I could go on with the lecture, since by that time I could barely remember what I had been trying to say in the first place.
I make my own fun.
**No, you didn't miss something. I had refrained from mentioning this because it wasn't central. I'm not "on the market" in the traditional sense, because I have a job that I like. But this was one of those job ads that you see and think, "That's my job." Except in this case, it wasn't.
6 comments:
Love. It. Those freehand maps are always a hoot.
I may have done...almost exactly that, in some past class.
My office is in an obscure part of campus, so my most recent map showed them how to find my office to turn in their final papers. Since many of them have no sense of compass directions, my point of orientation was "downtown," drawn with a halo and multiple colors of markers.
Have so been there! not necessarily with drawings, but ... I wonder if your dream job was my dream job?
I'm not "on the market" in the traditional sense, because I have a job that I like. But this was one of those job ads that you see and think, "That's my job." Except in this case, it wasn't.
Yup, that was me this year, too. It's still a bummer, but at least its not coupled with desperation.
Oh, my freehand maps are always disasters and I can so see this happening....
And sorry about dream job: it's always a bummer when that happens.
you should have a look at the peninsula of argyll in scotland. it manages to be so obscene, that UK censors used it to decide whether any gentleman on display in the movies was too excited. it he was at a more raised angle than argyll, then no show on the silver screen...
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