At the Sophia Club Holiday party a few of the other Bunting program ladies mentioned how they were shunned by the younger students. They didn’t say it with sadness or avarice, it was more like…..amusement.
Seriously, I thought it was just me. I asked Jean about it and she elaborated, “the kids don’t like us because we ruin the curve.”
I don’t have a firm grasp on the whole “curve” thing but from what I can tell it grades the shitty students harsher if there are some really outstanding students.
Sitting around the table with the rest of the old biddies we laughed and joked about how younger students avoid sitting next to us, don’t chit chat (we used that word because we’re old biddies) they only sit next to us on test day or talk to us if they’ve skived off class several days in a row and need to copy someone’s notes.
This took a load of my mind as I thought maybe it was simply my misanthropic personality and not in fact judgmental teenagers.
Then the weirdest thing happened. In my Intro to American Studies class, which has around 150 students in it, someone talked to me. Not just a question, but they…..I think it’s called…”struck up a conversation”. It happens so infrequently to me I’d almost forgot what it was. I guess I’m just so used to doing things by myself and for myself that I don’t feel the need for chatting up strangers and when they do it to me, it’s something i don’t recognize.
Anyway, the woman who sits next to me in Intro, talks to me a lot. She’s older than me. But our conversations have overflowed into rows behind us and as serendipity would have it, the girl who sits behind me has exchanged messages with me on the class website.
She’s married and lives off campus so it’s not as if I’ve cracked the younger demographic or anything but it’s a start.
