This is why, in an ideal world, they provide teachers with three month’s paid vacation.
By A STUDENT who disappeared in Week Four appears during the office hours SEK is holding in Week Ten.
STUDENT: Hi Scott!
SEK: Do I know you?
STUDENT: I’m from your afternoon class!
SEK: I know everyone in my afternoon class.
STUDENT: I may not have been there in a while.
SEK: Define “while”?
STUDENT: Some stuff that happened. Also things.
SEK: How many classes did stuff and things cause you to miss?
STUDENT: I was there for that class about how cameras work.
SEK: Which one?
STUDENT: The directors’?
SEK: Which one’s?
STUDENT: Camera?
SEK: Is that a quesiton?
SEK can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, he only wishes he couldn’t. It’s just that some complaints are as inevitable as Phil Collins bringing bombast to fanfare, and this particular complaint most certainly pulls a pure Phil Collins.
STUDENT: I don’t know. I’m confused.
SEK: As am I. Who are you again?
STUDENT: I’m in your afternoon class!
SEK: Then why don’t I know you?
STUDENT: Because some stuff and things happened and I stopped attending in Week Four.
SEK: I’m sorry you had to go through stuff and things. Life is tough. What can I help you with now?
STUDENT: What do I need to do to pass the class?
SEK: Which one?
STUDENT: Yours.
SEK: The one you didn’t attend?
STUDENT: But I have a draft of my Rhetorical Analysis that I wrote to make it up to you.
SEK: Make it up to me? This isn’t about you making it up to me. It’s about—
STUDENT: Can you at least take a look at my draft?
STUDENT hands SEK a draft of her “Rhetorical Analysis.” As he thought, it was a “Rhetorical Analysis” as performed by someone who had no idea what a rhetorical analysis is.
SEK: This isn’t a rhetorical analysis.
STUDENT: It’s about a horror movie.
SEK: That wasn’t really the focus of the class.
STUDENT: It was called a horror class.
SEK: The emphasis was on the creation of suspense.
STUDENT: Saw II was suspenseful.
SEK: Suspenseful torture porn, which if you were paying attention during the few classes you actually attended, you’d have remembered that that’s a genre I repeatedly specified we’d be avoiding.
STUDENT: But I heard you talking about it so it still meets your requirements.
SEK: No, it doesn’t.
STUDENT: Yes, it does.
SEK: How?
STUDENT: I analyze the effect of a horror film.
SEK: One I explicitly banned.
STUDENT: That was the assignment.
SEK: That was not the assignment.
STUDENT: But it was!
SEK: Then how come no one else in this class produced a similar document?
STUDENT: You’d have to ask them.
SEK: But they’re not here now, so I’m asking you: how did twenty-four students aim their arrows at the same side of the same barn and strike it (with varying degrees of thump and wobble)?
STUDENT: Some teachers don’t push ’em hard enough. Who has ’em aiming at barns and all when they could be shooting at aliens and shit?
SEK: Just so I have this straight: in Week Four you decided to up the rhetorical ante by chasing aliens and what you captured were the barely legible fears of a child forced to rewatch SAW II until someone produced an essay you deemed “college enough” to turn in. Am I missing something here?
STUDENT: But is there still something I could to do pass the cl—
SEK: No.
STUDENT: But what if I—
SEK: No.
STUDENT: I have a friend—
SEK: You’re going to need one—
STUDENT: And she said when you do this two quarters in a row they have to pass you. She said I’m on “Bemusement Leave” now and can only—
SEK: You’re on “Bemusement Leave“? I suggest you take it. Now.