wwhhhuuurr---??

i thought i had been teaching college students long enough to be aware of certain patterns, and therefore be able to predict various behaviors.

so when, this third week of classes (quarter system), a woman showed up in my class for the first time after having written me that she couldn't make it to the second week of classes for a medical emergency, and that she would drop by my office to catch up and never did, i assumed i was in for lots of excuses i didn't care about, followed by lots of (always ultimately unfulfilled) promises that she won't miss any more classes and she'll catch up right away, blah, blah. we were reading a difficult text that day--Foucault's "What is an Author?"--and i had very low hopes for her enthusiasm, etc.

the students were to have read it for that day, and in class the assignment was to go over it and pick out a passage they could "explain" to the rest of the class, and a passage that mystified them. many picked out, as a source of mystification, the concept that Foucault discusses called écriture. great, i said. does anyone want to take a stab at this? my heart sank when the new girl, whose experience with the essay was the 15 minutes in class i gave them to go over it for the exercise, raised her hand.

i called her name, and what spilled forth included not only a lovely french accent when pronouncing the word, but an explanation of the historic concept of écriture, which included a brief run through of the idea of the "a priori." oh.

after class, as we walked to my office to get her the syllabus and handouts, etc., i asked if she had read Foucault before. no, she said; only people who reference him. oh. turns out she was "bored in high school." mostly she's read a lot of sartre and his ilk (again pronouncing it correctly)--not because she's an existentialist, she assures me, but because she was interested in the existentialist project for other reasons. oh. is she a humanities major? no, she's transferring from biology to physics, but she's always loved philosophy because it gives a "boost" to science, and science makes philosophy matter. oh. all of this delivered in typical college student question-speak, with apologetic giggles, lots of makeup, and abercrombie & fitch sweatshirt.

WHERE?! AM?! I?!