kids do the darndest things
December 2nd, 2006 by Lawrence David
being a TA is great: it provides so much fodder for this blog. (again, it’s starting to worry me how i subconsciously ascribe value to my life experiences according to their blog-ogenicity)
today in office hours, i found myself helping this sweet, somewhat bashful undergraduate student with her implementation of gillespie’s chemical kinetics simulator. to protect her privacy, let’s call her beth.
me: your coffee smells great – what is that?
beth: oh, that’s a soy chai.
beth’s friend sitting next to us: yea, she’s allergic to soy.
me: [confused] wait …
beth’s friend: beth only got 4 hours of sleep last night. she drinks soy when she needs to stay awake; the mild irritation helps prevent her from dozing off during the day.
—-
speechless and mouth agape, i suddenly noticed how sleep-deprived beth looked. quiet awe gripped me. i mean, i did an undergrad in engineering myself – i’ve seen kids binging on energy drinks and popping caffeine pills. allegedly, a friend of a friend even mixed ritalin and methamphetamines to produce the perfect drug cocktail for cramming [think OCD for reading textbooks].
but exploiting an allergic response to combat sleep deprivation – “the irritation prevents her from dozing off.” that’s badass.
[ there's this mild, playful air of masochism that floats above this campus and that all the students breath in. perhaps even more disturbing - you're conditioned to think that that atmosphere is beneficial, since more work gets done. hurm, and i'm only perpetuating it by glorifying a student's (mostly benign!) self-injury. bad TA, bad! ]
I always thought of the “playful air of masochism” that you refer to as something more like a “miasma of misery”. I suppose it depends on who you ask