Sunday, December 14, 2008

Newsbreak: Reach Around Rodeo Clowns

Good morning...it’s 7 o’clock and this is an FM 89.3 newsbreak:
Senator Phil Gramm said Sunday he would file this week as a Republican candidate in the 1996 Presidential election. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Gramm said he would file papers with the Federal Election Committee this week to “put the legal structure in place,” although he does not expect to announce his candidacy until March.

OJ Simpson’s lead attorney Robert Shapiro is looking for ways to personally cash in on the media frenzy over Simpson. NewsWeek reported in its November 21 edition that Shapiro obtained a powerful Hollywood agent to field book and television offers. It later quoted the agent Ed Hookstratten as saying he sounding out writers to ghost write a book for Shapiro.

The English Channel tunnel – Chunnel – is open for trains now. Hundreds of people left Paris, London, and Brussels today in high speed trains that ride the rails of Chunnel. Round trip prices range from 152-to-311 dollars. The Paris to London trip is about three hours.

Cloudy this morning with scattered thunderstorms later today, highs in the upper 70s; the rain continues into the night with lows in the 50s. Currently, at 7:02, it’s 66 degrees.

After the Tuesday and Thursday morning newscasts there was just enough time to eat a cereal bar for breakfast, find the latest edition of the Screed, and head upstairs for 90 minutes of Dr. Propel’s class. Unlike M-days when my mornings were stacked with classes, T-days consisted of only two classes that were hours apart from each other.

Something called College Mathematics was my only other T-day class, held from 2-3:30 in one of the many similarly-named Academic Classroom Buildings (this one being dubbed ACB4). The instructor was the stereotypical college “prof,” an older, heavyset man with wispy gray hair and glasses who wore sports coats and vests but never ties. He went by the handle Dr. Cornelius Kirk – and yes, the pretentious phrase “by the handle” was very much the way he talked. But due to Dr. Kirk’s maturity and seniority, many students perpetuated a nickname they had been passed down from previous years: Captain. Therefore I had Captain Kirk for college math.

(I was actually surprised that midway through the semester that some of the smart alecs in class, two of whom I eventually likened to beavers, actually started calling Kirk “Captain.” This was a no-no. First off, throughout the semester Kirk corrected any student addressing him with a title other than “doctor.” He wasn’t Mr. Kirk, he was Dr. Kirk and had the degrees, the dissertations, and the domineering personality to back it up [he only used the first two examples in his clarification]. Secondly, it didn’t take much to irritate Kirk and after the third or fourth “Captain,” and the laughter and giggles that naturally followed, he peered over his glasses and pointed a pudgy finger toward the back corner. In no certain terms he told them to knock it off.)

Kirk’s class was essentially a cheaper, no-thrills version of the two algebra classes I had taken in high school. Most of the topics Kirk touched upon were familiar, though we had not gone into the same level of detail in high school; however many of the students had apparently not had a math class in a number of years and were constantly asking questions, often time about some of the simplest concepts. Like graphing a line. If anything stands out all these years later about Kirk’s class it’s that no one seemed to know how to graph a line. I won’t pretend to be an expert about algebraic equations – neither now, in Kirk’s class, or even in high school – but I thought this was one of the fundamental basics that everyone could muster. I was wrong.

The only other thing that stands out is Kirk’s penchant for ridiculous phrases (such as “by the handle”); hands down the one he used the most was “workhorse equation.” About midway through the semester we began a long, strung-out unit on matrices after, I assumed, Kirk gave up on everyone’s inability to graph lines. I forget the details but there was some basic expression that we all needed to know that would help us out later down the line. Weeks later, after we had flown by the easy lessons and were dealing with matrix addition, multiplication, transposition, or something, Kirk reminded us of this “workhorse equation” as the one that would solve all our problems. This “workhorse equation” was referenced frequently, with Kirk’s unabashed enthusiasm for it another target for the beavers.

I must have given the two class clowns the nickname “the beavers” when I failed to think of another animal to degrade. They were older than most other students, probably in their late-20s, and not at all a fan of Captain Kirk. One reminded me at the time as a possible beatnik: slicked-back black hair, pointy facial features like a jutted chin and sharp nose, and very outside-the-norm dress. Both lived for aggravating Kirk to no end, either by mocking his mannerisms, cracking jokes, or making him repeat something that he’d already discussed repeatedly. After going on about the rules of matrix multiplication for twenty minutes, one beaver would casually ask, “So you can't multiply a 2x3 and a 4x1 matrix?” An infuriated Kirk glared in their direction and barked back that “For the nth time – no! – I've said you can't do it!”

Even though the beavers irritated him Kirk was generally well-disposed with all the students and would go to great lengths to help them understand the topic at hand. While commendable, this generally led to extensive and drawn-out discussions that more often than not made Kirk forget what his original point was.

Besides the beavers, the only other student I remember all these years later was one I dubbed the Waddler. He waddled through the door and then waddled to the far side of the room, all the while that song by Dion played in mind with the lyric “he waddles around an’ around an’ around....”

Thankfully, this was the only math class I had in college and after this semester I never saw either the beavers or Captain Kirk again. However in my later years as an undergrad I did sort of miss courses like this – those with non-Communication majors. After seeing the same people day-in and day-out it was a nice change to see a bunch of students with different majors all taking a core class.

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Beaver
(Quentin Jones/Wendell Jones)
Reach Around Rodeo Clowns
From the album Whip It Out
1997