The Friday Tirade! This week's edition: The Aggressive Whinies

This semester's winner for the pitiful woe-is-me, whiny, hostile, I'm-totally-lost-and-it's-obviously-your-fault prize is on her way up to see me in a little bit. Every other semester or so I get a girl (not to be sexist but it's almost always a female) who, no matter how many times I try nicely to remind them to let me know if they have questions and no matter how much I stress that they grab me if they don't know where we are in the book or what we're doing in the current activity, when I call on her she is invariably lost and instead of answering the question we're on or saying civilly, "I'm sorry, I'm lost" or "I'm sorry, I don't understand" instead gives me the get off my back why is she always persecuting me I knew she was going to call on me next eyeroll with the accompanying Huff! and tosses me an "I have no idea what we're doing" with roughly the same tone of voice as (I'm guessing) a carjacker or a high security prison inmate just before giving you the shank. The crazy part is how these students always couple their aggressive tone with The Most Practiced Pound Puppy Pout in tarnation. It makes it all the more shocking when they zing you with the verbal attack. The very pulling-off of such high levels of incongruity is pretty impressive. (Seriously, they should become spies or something... if anyone needed really whiny, passive-aggressive, seemingly self-flagellating but in actuality quite egocentric hyper-defensive spies.)

Very nice cap-off to the week, I must say. This one flunked both the tests we've had so far so basically there's no hope (we're talking capital-F "Flunked" not just-apply-yourself-a-little-more, how-about-some-tutoring "flunked"). That means I can't even pretend to be nice re: the grade aspects at all, and won't have a lot of ideas about how she can achieve a successful outcome in the class at all. (Unless by "successful" one meant getting a just-barely-D, and that might be pushing it.)

To top it off she told me at the beginning of the semester that she is an international business major. Hmmm. OK sure I'm a linguist so I'm biased into thinking that we really still will need foreign language in the world commerce arena for a few years yet, but really... who are these crazy people who launch themselves into Int. Bus. without the smallest aptitude for foreign language whatsoever?! Better, who are the advisors who are letting them?

Yikes.

So as of 6 minutes from now (assuming she's on time, which was not the case with the last appointment she made...) color me in the thick of 10-15 minutes of that disbelieving mien they offer when they can't deal with the Cold Hard Truth...

TGIF indeed.






*****
PS
She canceled.
Colorez-moi surprise.

This weekend is looking up already.