Not my best thing...

OK, I admit it. Those of you who know me personally already know this, but patience is not my best thing. I can, in some circumstances, be endlessly patient--to the point that I surprise the hell out of myself. But most of the time, garden variety circumstances, my patience tanks hold about a pint of patience, after which they run dry and what comes out instead is almost teeth-gritted annoyance.

In my own defense, however, I have to say that the situation that taxed my patience today would probably have been vexing even for someone with much bigger patience reservoirs than mine.

Student in the SF class. I don't know anything about his background, or what his situation is now, except that he's not seeking a degree here; he's just taking every literature class that catches his eye. I may have mentioned him before: he's a little older than the usual student; if he were a decade or two older I'd think of him as a cast-iron hippie--but I also wonder if he was ever in the military because his behavior has all the hallmarks of TBI: traumatic brain injury. I've had students with TBI before, and it's extremely difficult to deal with. Classic symptoms include difficulty concentrating or processing information, memory problems, and emotional disturbances or irritability. In the case of this student, the "emotional disturbances" are more along the lines of difficulty with impulse control and--ironically, in this circumstance--impatience. (He also is a heavy smoker, so he comes to class reeking of it, and it's a smell I have a very hard time with: gives me headaches.) But I've explained to him at least three times what he has to do to successfully upload his essay to Turnitin, and he cannot get it. He says he's "bad with computers"--and today I finally had to say that he won't be able to get along very well if he doesn't develop a better relationship with them than he has. I feel for him: I know his behaviors are not under his control in a lot of ways. But God, I find it frustrating in the extreme, and today, I very nearly snapped--in the "I am not going to do this for you; you have to get help from the kind of people whose job it is to help you with this stuff" kind of snap.

Sigh. Well, anyway.

Today, two students withdrew from the class. One had missed six classes (out of ten class meetings); the other was the smart but sometimes snotty young man. I will miss the smarts of the occasionally snotty student--but there's still enough intellectual wattage in the room to make the class work well enough, I think.

I hope so, at any rate. I've asked Scott to sub for me on the 26th, and he agreed, though he doesn't usually sub. We've had some interesting conversations about Oryx and Crake, which is what the students will be working on, so I'll be curious to see what he manages to get out of them on the day.

For now, however, I am astonished to relate that I think I'm actually ready to leave for the evening. It is dark, but that's more about the season of the year than about my being here late. I'm sure as I'm driving home, I'll think "Oh, I meant to say something about that in the blog." But so be it. I have not only run out of patience, I've effectively run out of operational intelligence for the evening. I get to go home and make horrible noises on a fiddle instead of fiddling around here any more tonight. And we will see what the morrow brings.