Bubbles
I give notable students nicknames. I don't always use them publicly, mind you, so I never actually called a given sorority princess, "Lady Skanks-a-lot," but, after the thirteenth Precious made her way through, somehow their names seemed less important to me. I can't remember a single Precious, but I'll never forget Lady Skanks-a-lot.
Bubbles definitely fell into the unforgettable category. After the first class of the semester, a Wednesday that winter, she bounced her way up to the lectern (no it isn't a fucking "podium" and this mistake WILL cost your paper a letter grade) with a huge smile pasted below the devious eyes of an experienced, near professional, liar. She patiently waited for me to finish with, well, the subject of another story named Esther, but suffice it to say that Esther was asking for some accommodations, and given her situation and her willingness to work around her situation, I had no problem accommodating her. Bubbles, though? No. Bubbles was looking for a target to exploit, and she was only starting her second semester. I made a mental note to check her first semester grades before I agreed to anything she asked.
"Professor, I'm REALLY looking forward to your class, a lot!" Oh good. A steaming helping of bull fucking shit. First, had she listened or read anything related to the class, she wouldn't have used "really" or "a lot" with me even in casual conversation. Second, she was deeply engrossed in her phone for the entire class. I'm too old to have been born yesterday, and the bullshit wears thin quickly.
"The syllabus and grading looks very doable for me..." Yeah. Very this time. Swell. At this point I didn't tune out, but I began listening for key phrases which indicated substance amongst the ubiquitous flattery, the reframing of the contents of my syllabus as somehow optional, and the denigration of my class as less than necessary. I'm a fucking wordsmith as well as a teacher of wordsmiths, and this moronic teenage child was trying to double-talk me. Only one other student patiently waited, and before long he caught my eye, rolled both of his, and then pulled out a folder to write a note about what he needed. Young master Kyle had participated in class, and his patience with Bubbles had ended long before mine. After he packed up his folder and pocketed his pen, he caught my eye and handed me his folded note before inclining his head and heading for the door.
Bubbles kept prattling on and on...
Turns out she's on some sort of dance team that takes up a significant amount of her time, "socially and professionally," whatever the Hell that means, and she wanted to make sure she could make up any absences she accrued. I gestured to the syllabus and opened my mouth to explain the policy, but she kept right on talking. So I closed my mouth and continued to listen with both my amusement and irritation increasing by the minute. I didn't have back-to-back classes that semester, and I figured this unequal exchange qualified as the day's Office Hours.
When she finally took a break to breathe, I suggested we head for my office so she can explain, specifically, what she needed from me in order to satisfy all of her campus obligations while still participating in my class. She literally bounced as she replied with a giddy, "Okay!"
Bubbles stood about 5' 4" with a slim dancer's body, and when I rarely saw her that semester, she always wore tights, sometimes with a skirt, but always with a short top of some sort that showed off her toned tummy. As the semester grew to a close in the spring, her jacket disappeared, and she replaced her tops with hankies and strings instead of shirts. Sometimes she wore bicycle shorts instead of the yoga tights. I like to think I didn't overtly keep my eyes on her when she graced the class with her presence, but there's no denying she's attractive. She had long, straight, and shiny yellow blonde hair that gave her a presence beyond her athletic body and high cheek bones. She was striking, and she knew it. Also, she clearly put her assets to use.
As we walked to my office, she kept going on and on about the dance team, and she told me way too much. It's not a school activity. It's a club. This is fine, but where I have to make accommodations for football and volleyball players missing class due to games, I don't have to do shit for the Dungeons and Dragons club, the local Moose Lodge, the Shriners,...or some dance club. I let her go on, though. The whole thing was getting funnier to me by the minute, and my irritation waned once I could sit in my big comfy chair.
"...So I just HAVE to be there on Wednesdays, there's just no way around it, and if there's any work at all, especially if there's a lot of it, then it might be Monday instead of Friday when I can get it to you, and we have four competitions on Fridays that we have to travel to during the day and I can read or whatever on the trip but those four days I won't be able to come to class Friday either, but maybe it could be made up with a character outline or something? Oh, you should come see our routine at the mall on Thursday -- our practices are so intense, but they're nothing compared to a performance like that..."
I honestly haven't got the foggiest fucking idea what this dance crew was, but I think it was a bunch of 18-19 year old girls with showbiz delusions in the East Coast middle Atlantic states. The upshot of it all was that she would be able to attend class on Mondays, but not Wednesdays, and she would find it difficult to impossible to attend most Fridays, as well. Class work, particularly discussion, she would make up. And when she got to missing the mid-term and asking for a make-up date, I began chuckling.
".................what?" Her facial expression screamed an absolute lack of understanding.
"Miss..." I glanced down at the class list, "Jones is it?"
She nodded, "call me Brandi!...with an I."
"Alright Brandi with an I," I smiled at her, but she was more taken aback at my response than anything else. "It sounds to me like you have far more pressing matters than my class."
She blinked. It never occurred to her that I might suggest my class wasn't a good fit for her.
"You should probably drop CW201 and not worry about the mid-term, class work, or attendance. This class will require a fair amount of writing, not only reading, though reading good books will help you become a better writer, and reading on trips cannot make up for creative brainstorming sessions during class time. Those are meant to inspire ideas in my students. I want to hear what you think. I want to hear what you think about. I want your dreams adorning paper, and I want that adorned paper to express some part of who you are. Think of it as dancing with language."
She nodded, still utterly befuddled by my response.
"If you stay in my class, you will need to abide by the policies laid out in the syllabus. If you cannot, then I highly recommend you not stay in my class. Add/drop is in two weeks, so you have some time to think about it and make a well-considered decision. It's up to you."
Bubbles finally found her voice again, "but what about Esther?" I raised an eyebrow. "Well, you told her you would accommodate her schedule, but you won't accommodate mine? That's really not fair."
"Well, I'm not telling you someone else's business, but Esther has significant responsibilities elsewhere-..." she opened her mouth to interrupt, but I raised my hand to stop her, "and Esther was asking to make accommodations that allow her to DO the work rather than to get out of doing the work. So there's quite a difference between what you are asking and what she asked."
She looked mutinous for an instant before quickly hiding it, so I pressed her. "If you'd like, you can file a complaint with the department. Professor Blake's office is one floor up. I'm sure he'd love to hear this." He would. He'd send me a thank you note for the opportunity to chew her a new asshole. Verbally, I mean. As far as I knew, he didn't partake of the coeds.
Bubbles returned to bubbling. She would be in class, participate, do the work, she her ideas with me...yeah. Okay. Well, I can't control whether she drops the class or not, so...
You know what happened.
*******
Spring sprang. I enjoyed that semester tremendously. The students shared a wealth of engrossing ideas, they built towering skyscrapers on each others' ideas, and they blew away their own expectations. By the end of the semester, six of them had nearly finished books and some had outlines for several more.
Bubbles made a token effort to begin with, and she had at least warned me that she'd be gone for most of the classes, but she skipped the mid-term, she never even asked me for a make-up time, and by the last three weeks of the semester, I didn't see her in class at all.
She wasn't dead, mind you. After her invitation, I took an afternoon to see her dance troupe's performance, and, poof, they had a new fan. As you might have figured out by now, I like a nice lady ass. One might even say I'm a connoisseur thereof, and the dancer figures these young ladies maintained were profoundly impressive -- stimulating, even. So on instafacepagetwittergrambook...I followed that crew on all of them. I knew where she was for every class, exam, and assignment she missed or skipped. Her dance crew's social media coordinator kept on top of everything remotely related to them, so I easily followed their progress, but I still had zero idea of their ultimate goal.
Bubbles greeted me enthusiastically after that first performance, and she thanked me again for coming at the next class she attended, but then she promptly ghosted. After reaching out the standard three times via email, and getting Silent Casper as a response, I shelved her as Not My Problem.
********
During the last week of the semester I sat at my desk while grading their final projects; I preferred doing actual work during my office hours, and for that semester, I skipped the final exam entirely and let their final creative project be their final grade. It gets us all into our break a smidge quicker, and this particular class had done such spectacular work that I figured they didn't actually need a formal exam. Bubbles seriously missed out.
As I read the violent and racy exploits of Space Pirate Perkins and His crew of Tentacular Aliens, a soft knock on my open door pulled me from a particularly amusing naked wrestling match between, no shit, First Officer Desiré Morehead and a Jello Creature from Alpha Centauri who clearly longed to dehydrate her with orgasms.
My ongoing chuckles continued as I glanced up to see Bubbles looking far less Bubbly than the last time I saw her.
I smiled. "Miss Jones! Long time no see! How's the dancing career going?" Her eyes blew wide open in surprise as she expected hostility instead of friendliness, and she clearly preferred to discuss her dancing over whatever brought her here. She perked up a bit before replying.
"Really good." I smirked at her phrasing. "Er...very well..." My countenance slumped a bit more as my chuckles restarted. "It's...glorious, invigorating...meaningful..." She hadn't learned much in my class, but she apparently noted that the words REALLY and VERY were both really very fucking verboten.
"That's better. Tell me about how dance is so meaningful."
She paused for a moment to ponder. "It's like..." her eyes popped open at yet another nothing phrase I professionally despise, but I motioned for her to continue. "When I dance the world makes sense. Even when we work a fast beat, the world slows down. I feel like I fit in existence."
"So it organizes the chaos of the universe itself for you..."
"YES!" She leapt to the edge of her seat with wide eyes since I apparently understood her so well.
"Yeah, writing does that for me. There was a musician who said something along the lines of, 'if nothing else could demonstrate it, music proves to me that God exists.'" Her eyes went wide with recognition as she nodded.
I placed the Space Pirate Perkins story back on the to-be-read pile, leaned back in as relaxed a manner as I could muster, interlaced my fingers across my belly, and calmly focused on the wayward dancer. "What can I do for you, Miss Jones?"
Her glorious, invigorated, and meaningful countenance dropped into despair. "I hoped to speak to you about my grade."
"Okay, well, here's your big chance. Speak to me about your grade to your heart's content."
She remained silent for a solid minute before murmuring, "it can't be good..."
