if anyone wants to get their Edison on

I came up with quite the brainstorm yesterday. I think the most desperately needed invention of the day for any instructors teaching core curriculum (or perhaps major curriculum, too - I can't speak for them) is a neural injection device that one could self-administer before each new semester or quarter. It would contain an anti-mnemonic drug which would erase memories in an instructor's head about all the ad nauseum reminding and repeating oneself that is requisite with each new crop of students who listen (of course) less and less well.

This way, you could start the new semester ready to remind that semester's students of all the normal crap that they never listen to but you wouldn't have all the nasty bitter residual resentment from previous years of reminding previous classes all the same exact things. Thus, any frustration building up in the new semester would be more valid since it would only be based on that semester's students' lameness and anti-listening rather than inflicting years of having-had-it-up-to-HERE-with-repeating-oneself onto new groups of students who really have only accrued one semester's worth of wrath, i.e. the current resentment towards one's current students would actually be earned and therefore more justifiable. That's fair, isn't it?

This would help avoid those days when you (OK, well, when I, anyway) lose it and find yourself riffing in class about all the stuff that they can access on WebCT or how the excuse policy works or about that weird new invention, the syllabus, in that strident fed-up voice (which, let's face it, is dangerously close to sounding whiny) because the 471st student in all your years of teaching felt the need to ask, "Where can I see my grades?" or "When can I make up the [un-make-up-able] Mini-Quiz?" or "How much are our tests worth?" Or at least, on those days when you wanted so badly to riff but just bitched with officemates instead, you would be spared the subsequent guilt trip accompanied by the nagging suspicion that you, your career, and your outlook are morphing into the spiritual and professional equivalent of those cancerous lungs Mr. Griffin showed us in 9th grade health class filmstrips.

Oh, and when you had a class which didn't need reminding of anything, you would then be spared an entire semester of jadedness on that score.

Ha.