Double Flee A

The two guys on my left are both watching the Stephen Colbert roasting of the president. Their faces are a certain kind of smiling you don't see that often. It's like the sun has broken through the clouds and they're at the end of the rainbow or something like that.

Our instructor in the second year has a habit of talking about what he's thinking, rather than what the lesson is. Lucky for us he's thinking about watches and so on, and even better, specifically the parts of the watch we're covering. So what is it that I'm bitching about? Bear with me.

The information we get is accurate, thorough, and technically exhaustive. We get, on average, one really great tip every day. If properly organized, our instructor's knowledge bank would be a gold mine and we'd all be rich quick.

Today what could have taken a much shorter period of time, our instructor turned into a long soak in cold pain. The things he said did relate to the subject at hand, were essential facts, were in fact exactly what we needed to know. But when you're looking at a page with parts that need to be labeled, you want to fill in the blanks, and his delivery, his style of presenting the information, is quite indirect.

Here's how it goes down: the piece you're supposed to label will appear in some sentence. If you miss it, you'll have to ask for it to be repeated, and he's going to sigh when he repeats it, or make some dramatic gesticulation or roll his eyes, and he's probably going to go so far as to say that he said it already, so what happens is this quasi-unbearable situation develops where you have to scrutinize every syllable as it's coming out of his mouth. Just to label the GD paper. This level of attentiveness is very hard, extremely hard, almost impossibly hard, to maintain because he talks for hours. By the end of a lecture-heavy day, and most of them are, I'm literally exhausted. I feel like my brain has been pounded on.

My problem with how he does things is so nearly personal, just a titch from hurty feelers, that I can't tell him about it. He spent years as a drama coach, for Pete's sake. He'd die. That and I'd have to suggest a whole new way of presenting information; I'd in essence be implying that he allow me to micromanage his whole shtick, and that's even more ridiculous than getting talked at badly all day.

What really hits me hardest about the situation is that I finally realized today that it's so unpleasant to endure I've never actively analyzed what makes it be painful. Instead I push it out of my mind and have a beer and move on, which you have to. Now that I've thought about it I realize it's strange to write and think and say; class some days is actually a source of suffering in a very real way due to exactly this kind of lecture. It's a psychological pain, if there's such a thing.

I really hope he doesn't find this and read it, or else he might get his feelings hurt. I'm taking a risk by even putting it down here. That's the internet for you.

posted by dale @ 1:15 PM