Numbnuts

It was the second week of the semester. I walked into class, picked up my roll sheet, and waded in between the desks to take attendance. I was still trying to learn students' names, and walking around enabled me to strike conversations that make it much easier to connect names to faces.

I came to Nate, a back-rower. You never know about these backbenchers, they can either be thoroughly engaged students who like the observational perch, or too-cool-for-schoolers who hate the fact that you're asking them to learn.

I pointed to Nate's Blackberry sitting on the corner of his desk. Sure, I could've seen the thing as a conversational piece, or communed with another smartphone user, but honestly, I was mainly conducting field research for tech stocks like Apple (iPhone) and RIMM (Blackberry).

As astonishing as that admission might sound, it is true.

"How's that working out for ya, Nate?" I asked.

"This?"

"Yeah... Blackberry, right?"

"Yeah, it's great, I have it for work."

"You like it?"

"It's great, it's my Crackberry, have you heard that term?"

"Yeah," I laughed.

"Although the battery is losing memory," Nate said.

"Why's that?"

"I didn't charge it properly. You have to let the battery run down before charging it, otherwise the battery develops this memory where it thinks it's empty before it actually is."

"Seriously? Oh shit, I charge mine everyday," I gasped.

It didn't take me long on the web to find out that the kind of memory deterioration that Nate was talking about didn't affect me, since my phone uses a Lithium-ion battery, not a Nickel-Cadmium battery where that problem occurs.

It should've been my first clue, though, that Nate was just a little full of shit. He seemed overwilling to display his techie knowledge, yet remained ignorant that his Blackberry uses a different battery. In hindsight, his Blackberry's position on the desk also seemed a tad ostentatious.

Fast forward a few weeks, to the review session for the midterm. I distributed the study guide, then answered a few questions about time limits, format and recommended prep strategies. When I asked for questions, Nate's hand was the first one up.

"What kind of questions will they be?"

"Short answers and essays." The topic had been addressed just seconds before, but I replied patiently anyway.

"No multiple choice?"

"What? Multiple choice? Ha. Yeah... no."

"Come on," Nate seemed to playfully plead.

I took a breath and said, equally semi-seriously: "Every semester, this happens at least once. There are students who try negotiating. I used to wonder why they'd think I was such a schmuck, but I came to find out that it actually works sometimes, and some teachers actually give in. Do I look like a pushover?"

The class chuckled. Nate smiled.

"And the other thing is, have some self-respect, you know? Multiple choice? What is that? This isn't [Rich College], know what I mean?"

"Rich College" is the private university on the other side of the same town. Expensive, well guarded and utterly unchallenging, it operates with the axiom that education is a service industry.

I like to use that line because it's part ridicule, part cheerleading, used in the hope that many of these working class students would see these classroom challenges as a validation of their intellects.

Like the rest of the class, Nate seemed to get the joke. But hours after turning in his midterm, he wrote to tell me that he was withdrawing from the class because of what his grade would do to his GPA.

A few weeks after that, before class started, I walked in on some students discussing this person they seemed thoroughly annoyed by. Unable to resist, I asked what they were talking about.

"That guy who used to sit at the back," Luke, a front-rower, said.

"You mean Nate?"

"Yeah, oh God he had such an attitude. When we would be outside waiting to come in, he'd just go on and on complaining about what the point was... like what's the point of a Bachelors."

"Really? He seemed all right in class."

"No, he was annoying," two other students said in near unison. One of them rolled her eyes.

Luke added: "I loved it when he asked for multiple-choice and you told him to have some self-respect!"

"Maybe he's just too cool for school." I said to a few final guffaws.

Nate really was fine while he was in the class. But it was a good thing he dropped early, because if he had stayed in and acted like an asshole, he couldn't hate the class more than I would've hated the fact that he was in it.