While there we went to a party in a stranger’s hotel room and there I met a resident of PCB (as it was sometimes known) who suffered from the weird misconception that west–that is the cardinal direction–is on the left–that is the left-hand side. I, having had a few Buschs, tried to help by qualifying that west is only on the left if you happen to be facing north. He didn’t disagree that west does always correspond to the cardinal direction west, but continued to insist that it’s also the left, wherever you happen to be facing. “You know, like when you say something’s west of here,” he offered, waving his arm to the left. I imagine this would also mean that you’re always facing north, even when you turn left, which introduces all sorts of problems. Anyway, seeing that I wasn’t going to get anywhere and being uncomfortable with his animated insistence, I tried to agree. He didn’t seem convinced of my sincerity, though, and I had to melt into the unruly crowd of the party to escape.

I haven’t gone back to Panama City Beach since then, but I assume they have GPS devices and can find their way around.

If it turns out you’re starting to suspect that your chosen field, the one in which you did all that training and specializing, is really a charade and you wish someone had told you years ago about the emperor and his clothes and all that, then our similarities are getting uncanny.

Just don’t tell me that you can’t get a callback about a volunteer job, because that would be too weird.

My wife and I went to eat lunch at a downtown eatery where we watched the Bush era board a helicopter and fly away. Afterward as I was walking to the data analysis center to do some data analysis, a former student stopped me on the sidewalk. At first I didn’t recognize him but he had been in my class the last fall. He blew it off most of the time and didn’t put one iota of effort into the work, which earned him a C-. Seems like a pretty good deal, but you have to get at least a C to get credit for the class, so giving it to him I felt like he at least had to deal with the repercussions of his negligence by taking the class over again. Since it’s unlikely he ever had to deal with repercussions before and didn’t want to start now, he sorrowfully told me he didn’t get his Political Science degree because of this and asked me to give him a chance to bring up his grade–that’s the grade that had been assigned more than a month earlier and about which he never said anything. It seems to me that not getting your degree is pretty serious business and that you ought to be a little concerned about it while class is actually in session and not just when you randomly bump into your former instructor, but to each his own, right?

Being a flexible fellow, probably feeling the flowering of a new age of international goodwill brought about by a president the world didn’t hate, but really just being caught off guard and not having had time to consider what I was doing, I told him to rewrite his final take home exam to actually answer the question instead of writing a book report on an irrelevant book as he had done the first time. After telling me he’d have it in my hands in one week and assuring me I wouldn’t regret giving him another chance he wandered off and I never heard from him again.

Never, that is, until a couple of weeks ago, almost precisely six months later. That’s when he emailed me with his completed do-over exam asking me to please accept it and raise his grade (not seeming to consider the likelihood that I would have to read and grade it first). He apologized for the “time lapse”  which went wholly unexplained and which sounded to me like he may have been sucked into a wormhole and mysteriously emerged six months in the future.

I’m in favor of second chances but this was more like a third chance and that’s pushing it a little far. And really it’s a lot more chances than that since he had four months of chances during the semester that he actually took the class. So I had to let the kid down, which I did with a very businesslike, one sentence email denying his request. I had had different impulses, one to simply not respond, another to respond six months later. But in these situations I always feel like I have to act responsibly so students will have nothing to complain about. Telling him that it’s rather too late to revisit the whole thing, I prefaced my denial with “I’m sure you’ll understand” in an effort to get across the point that he should have understood that this was insane.

Of course, he didn’t understand. He emailed me a few days later to ask “with the most sincerity” to reconsider. It had never crossed my mind that maybe he was just yankin’ my chain about the whole thing, but I could now rest assured that was sincere. Out of curiosity I had looked at the rewritten essay and found that he really did put some effort into turning his irrelevant book report into a somewhat longer irrelevant book report. So I guess that’s what passes as sincerity: “I took the time to write some more crap for your test thing, what more do you want?” he’s probably thinking.

But if I were overly sensitive, the offensive part of this second email would be his telling me that this was “the only hurdle holding me back from receiving my diploma and allowing further my life” and his request “to help me move on.” It’s not really the poor sentence construction that’s offensive as much as the characterization of my class as some sort of insuperable barrier impeding his progress and the suggestion that by not giving him the grade he wants I’m willfully preventing him from meeting his full potential. Nowhere in any of this jeremiad was there even the tacit acceptance of any personal responsibility at all.

So I guess what we’ve learned in all the rancor and nastiness of the first six months of Obama’s presidency is that hoping for change isn’t enough to make it. There’s no such thing as post-racial or post-partisan and there will always be plenty of students much happier to blame me for their shortcomings than open a high school reading level textbook and remember the words in bold print.

——————-

Update: Maybe expecting me to have regretted my two earlier decisions, he emailed me again six weeks later to raise the whole issue again. Perhaps he imagined me lying awake at night, tossing restlessly as I saw images of myself before a stern judge condemning me for so cruelly and arbitrarily shattering the dreams of an innocent youth, and decided to let me stew for a while before he swooped in to offer a chance at redemption and allowing further my own life.

This is when I finally felt licensed to take a pointed tone and told him not to write me again. Now the deadline to change the grade has passed and I have to admit I feel a little sorry for it. I guess he was sort of an outlet for my accumulated frustration with lazy and irresponsible knuckleheads who need to be taught a lesson.

That’s not surprising in itself given that sets cost money, but what else occurred to me was that it seemed like most of the other sitcom houses I could think of shared the stage left front door. One after another, I thought of sitcom houses with the door on the left: Good Times, Good Times, Sanford and Son, Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss, Small Wonder, Full House, Mr. Belvedere, Growing Pains, the list went on and on. Of course exceptions immediately popped into mind, like Seinfeld, the Cosby Show, Diff’rent Strokes, and Family Ties. But it seemed like for every right-hand door I could name there were three or four left-hand doors. I began to wonder if there was some reasoning behind left-hand doors: is it somehow cheaper, or do they put the cast snack table on the right according to hallowed tradition stemming from medieval theater days?

After a while I had to discard this whole notion as a case of selective memory. I started to realize that I could name just about as many right-hand doors as left. Even the turbolift door to the Enterprise bridge was on the right (classic and TNG). Nonetheless, every time I remembered a right-hand door I felt a little dispirited, like a novel discovery was slipping from my fingers, and I wished it would go away. “Curse you ALF set” I would think.

Now as a social scientist, I know there’s something to be learned in this. I now know how my fellow social scientists feel when they see their theories melt away when subjected to empirical testing. So the lesson might be the importance of a value free scientific method, rigorous hypothesis testing, and consideration of alternative hypotheses, all of which guard against the introduction of personal bias in scientific investigation of the social world. But since I think that’s all so much hokum, I think the lesson is probably that it might be unnatural that I remember so many fictitious houses as well as any I actually grew up in and that I spent half my waking hours as a kid watching TV.