Strange People?

That would be Mrs. Nixon. She was short with short red hair and in her late forties. She was very interested in her pet cat and thought that it would be a good idea to tell fifteen year old high school students about her sexcapades with her significant other. I don’t know how that woman kept her job.

My grandfather is ninety-five and has Alzheimer’s. His old age coupled with his OCD makes for some interesting stories. Grandpa Hart always kept a meticulous yard, and several decades ago, he even paid to have his pecan trees grafted to bear better fruit. He recently hired a landscaping company to dead head every single giant pecan tree in his yard. It now looks like Stonehenge. He also paid the landscaping crew to cut down his neighbor’s shrub. The neighbor sued for damages. I wonder what motivates him to do such bizarre things.

I grew up around musicians. Not sure if it was the jazz or the drugs (jn the 70s-80s) but they could be quiet strange. A jazz guitarist, Joe Bob, once told me that when he played it was like he wasn’t even there. Not sure where the guy was but it wasn’t on this planet.

I'm a nurse. I've met a lot of strange people. Did you know there are people who collect their own feces? I've met mass murders. In fact, when I was in nursing school I was assigned to take care of a guy who'd killed a TCU professor.

He no longer shaves but plucks his beard. His clothes come from second hand stores. He spends nearly as much time in fields as a farmer, looking for mushrooms. He once saved a friend from drowning, while donning American flag Speedos.


Worst Teacher

Since I started college, I haven’t had a professor that stands out as the worst or even bad. I did have a high school teacher, algebra two, Mrs. Nixon, who spent most of the class period discussing her cat and her rendezvous with her boyfriend in Atlanta. I learned nothing in that class.

The worst class I have ever had was a psychology class at A&M. I loved the material being taught but the people I had the misfortune to call classmates made it a nightmare. The class was about physical psychology. Though not outwardly stated, there was underlying theme or concept in which men were nothing more than hormonal animals whose every thought is motivated by sex. They felt that the most important factor that males had in what they desired or sought after in a relationship was the size of the woman’s breasts. There were mostly women in the class and the males in the class (other than myself) did nothing to disagree and openly expressed their agreement with the belief. There were times when I wanted to just stand up and yell out at all of them for being such children, for not seeking to actually live above that of an animal and develop some form of morality and decency.

I once had a college professor that came to class stoned. He taught a course on Poe. I loved the class but didn’t like it when he would start crying and lamenting his lost girlfriend.

I took a sociology course as an undergrad called “American Society.” The professor ran the course in a manner in which any ideas or papers that seemed to defend the American society were unwelcome, and graded poorly. Apparently the point was to bash the U.S., and never recognize that there were causes for decisions and events that did not mean the country was entirely evil. Whether he was correct or not, I did not like how open discussion and varied ideas were not welcome.

My worst experience was in class that the teacher was just bored. She didn’t believe in us, told us we’d never use the information and wouldn’t learn it anyways, so she wouldn’t bother. During class, she read from the book, in a class where that should NOT have been an option. I think education is a two way street and it takes both the student and the teacher bringing their best. As someone who is currently a teacher and a student, I still believe this to be true and of course it’s a challenge and some days are better than others. This was definitely a case where there was a lack of investment and as a result, I still dislike that class (and subject) years later.