Gah. GAH! I tell you.

2004-08-11 at 7:38 p.m.

Let's say, for argument's sake, you're part of a group that has a presentation in class one day. It could be about anything, really, but let's just pretend it's about "Teachers in Literature". And let's just say that the average age of your audience is about 30, and the average years of school for this audience is about eighteen years.

Now let's say there's another group scheduled to go after you. It's 10 a.m. Class goes until 12:30.

Should your presentation:

(a) go about half an hour to forty-five minutes, lightly touch on representations of teaching in classic literature

(b) take about an hour, taking samples of teachers from young adult literature, classic literature, and new literature, categorizing and summarizing the various representations of teachers and teaching, and drawing a conclusion about meaning and interpretation.

(c) take one hour and fifty three agonizing minutes, talk about six books, show three movie clips, and fucking read Mary Poppins to us as if we were three, and make no conclusions, assumptions, or even assertions at all during that entire god awful eye-pokingly bad two hours?

Guess which one happened today. Guess who might maybe have been in the group that got bumped.

Funnily enough, the Mary Poppins reader was Miss Poo Poo Pouty Pants, and the movie shower was Gloomy von Grouchy. I felt bad for Dude, the third guy in the group whom I really do like.

The thing is, our prof said when introducing these projects four weeks ago that the presentation could be anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours. We--or at least I--had thought he was joking.

Oh oh oh how wrong we were.

Blackguard Nick was across the way, and he and I kept taking turns miming suicide, torture, anything to escape. At one point he was poking his eye out with a highliter, I was pulling out my fingernails with a binder clip. Geo Alyssa and I were writing notes--writing notes, y'all! I regress to ten after an hour of incompetent lecture! (And we still had Dude and Gloomy von Grouchy to go!)

At one point, Miss PPPP was meandering through Miss Jean Brodie and it was agonizingly unconnected and she was clearly making the shit up as she went along (please note: she's older than me by at least a decade, and maybe two) and I catch the eye of Spit-Take Russ. Y'all woulda been so proud of me--I held it in! I didn't laugh!

He did.

During yet one more three-minute-long stammering pause, suddenly he lost control and just started gasping. Miss Poo Poo Pouty Pants pauses. "Yes?" she asked, just like a freaking librarian.

"It's just so... so.. ridiculous!" Spit-take Russ gasps. "She teaches about sex, has an affair, takes advantage of her students... and they fire her for being a fascist?!?!?"

And Poo Poo totally bought it.

The rest of us knew better, though.

The moral is this: know what you're presenting, do it quickly, succinctly, and animatedly, or don't fucking do it at all.

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