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Thursday, May 05, 2005

Final exam

My first semester of teaching at the University of Illinois was terrible.  That is, the university was fine; I was terrible.  I taught two sections of American literature since 1914—a pretty easy assignment to start out with—and botched them both.  It was my first semester as a real live assistant professor, and I was thoroughly uncomfortable with being called “Professor Bérubé,” so I taught frenetically and obliviously.  But that wasn’t the half of it: our entire household was frazzled.  We only had Nick then (he was three and a half; Jamie was born two years later), but we couldn’t afford full-time day care at $90 a week (this was before I’d pegged my salary to David Horowitz’s, of course), so we signed Nick up for half-day care in the afternoons.  Janet and I both taught in the mornings (MWF), but we took what we could get, and nobody was offering half-day care in the mornings.  So Janet taught from 9 to 9:50 a.m. and then again at 11; I taught from 10 to 10:50 and then again at 12.  Day care began at 1 pm.  I would take a Champaign city bus to campus with Nick, getting to a stop four blocks north of the English Building at 9:47, walk Nick to the building, meet Janet in the hall, and hand off Nick with three or four minutes to spare; at a few minutes to 11, Janet would pass him back to me; he and I would grab lunch while Janet taught, and then I’d toss him back to Janet, and she would take him to day care.

Nick didn’t think much of this arrangement, either.  When he got to day care, the first item on the agenda was an hour-long “nap.” Nick didn’t take naps.  I leave Nick’s experience of day care to your imagination.

To make matters worse, Nick was sick all semester long.  This was 1989, the very last year before the industrialized world developed nebulized steroids for asthmatics (Vanceril, for those of you in the know), and Nick had one bronchial event after another.  And they still permitted leaf-burning in Champaign-Urbana in 1989, which meant that for weeks at a time during October and November, Nick left the house at his peril.

So we were all anxious and sleep-deprived and generally scrambled.  I’d often finish up my class preps at 2 am, give Nick his overnight meds (no point going to bed at 12 or 1 when you had to do 2 am meds, now), then teach the next morning on some mixture of caffeine and adrenaline.  It didn’t work.  I can still remember my course evaluations that term—a lousy 3.9 out of 5 in one section, and an abysmal 3.6 in the other.  (My average over twelve years at Illinois wound up at 4.45, pretty good but not great.  But you can get some sense of what a 3.6 means.)

And then came the final exam.  At last!  I’d already turned in the grades for the 10 am section, and now I would return my 12 pm section’s final papers, read their exams that night and the next day, and I’d be done, done, done.  The exam was at 7 pm, and I spent the afternoon in my office, grading the last eight or nine papers I’d be returning that evening.

Now, a word about my office.  (It’s not absolutely critical to the story, but it’ll help to set the scene.) At the time, the enormous, rambling old English Building was in the middle of a long-term renovation, and though I had a huge corner office on the third floor (which I “shared” with someone who never used it, because she was the associate head and had an administrative office on the second floor), it was a huge corner office in the unrenovated part of the building.  The staircase on my end of the building went down only to the second floor; below that there was nothing but a dark airshaft, at the bottom of which, I was fond of saying, there was surely a heap of gasoline-soaked rags and a few smoldering cigarette butts.  On the second floor, there were the remains of a basketball court (the building had once been a gymnasium, and its central atrium was once a swimming pool); this had long since been cubicled and subdivided into graduate teaching assistant “offices.”

At 6:30 or so I finished up my grading, left my office, went to the men’s room (the nearest one was down that flight of unrenovated stairs, across from the basketball court), chatted for a few moments with one of the graduate students, came back upstairs, and . . . found that I had somehow locked my door behind me.  With my keys, and my graded papers, and all my final exams on the other side of the door.

Oy, I said to myself, now I have to go and get the master key from the secretaries . . . oh my god, there are no secretaries!  It’s a quarter to seven.  The #@%&ing department office is closed. I began to think of some way I could go in through my window, but this would involve climbing outside through the second-floor TA offices, then using my super spider powers to scamper across the front of the building and up one flight.  It didn’t seem likely.

Panicking, I ran around on the second floor, wondering if perhaps I could break into the department office instead and grab myself that master key.  Now, there’s a memorable way to start your career!  And just when I was rattling the office door to see if it would be worth trying the old credit-card shimmy, who should come walking down the hall but the Department Head Himself!

Ahem.  As I explained to this curious and patient man that I was not in fact a criminal but merely a kolossal klutz, I noted that it was now five minutes to seven and that I would truly, truly appreciate it if he would be so kind as to open the office, find a master key in the secretaries’ supply cabinets, and allow me to get back into my office and give my final.

He found the whole thing rather amusing.  And yes, he got the master key for me.

So, for all of you who are either giving or taking finals this week, best of luck.  Just remember to keep your office keys in your pockets at all times.

Posted by Michael on 05/05 at 01:46 PM
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