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| :- Fred (Photo credit: Rob Warde) |
There's a guy in my comp class who sits across the aisle from me, and spends half his time whining about everything, from how hard the assignments are to how the shades are pulled down on the windows. He has not taken any notes all semester. I did a peer review for him a while back, and I was really, really, really shocked by what he thought was a good paper. It stank on ice, as my uncle Gus would put it, and the guy -- I'll call him Fred -- was pretty pleased with his work. I'm not sure Fred ever reads anything he doesn't absolutely have to. For one thing, he's the Fragment King. Most of his "sentences" are missing either a subject or a verb, or they're just phrases.
So why am I writing about him today? Yesterday he was whining about his grade (finals are in 2 weeks) and how Toffee expects too much work (totally ignoring the fact that the school requires us to write a certain number of words for the course), and how she thinks we're actually going to revise stuff, and nobody does that for real, right? and HE WOULDN'T SHUT UP.
Toffee's up at the front of the room explaining how to write answers to essay questions on exams, and Fred is muttering to himself non-stop. I finally turned to him and shushed him like an old lady in church. You would've thought I slapped him. And, it turned out that I just made it worse. Now he was muttering AT ME. He got this kind of wounded look on his face, and said, "like any of this matters." Well, it matters to me, and I'm not just whining, I'm venting (the difference is obvious, isn't it?).
I should have changed my seat at the first whine, back in August.
Love that title! Mine is so boring in comparison!
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