sheer potentiality

I rather dislike when people sit next to me in class. I’m not antisocial, and I don’t dislike people, but I usually require a large amount of personal space. And that doesn’t really happen when there are people sitting next to me, watching my computer screen, restricting my elbow room, etc. Of course, given that someone has to sit beside me, I would rather someone sit on my left side than on my right, as that way I have the most elbow room. What I truly despise is when people sit on both sides of me. It makes me feel rather claustrophobic, to be honest.

In theory, TA’s are better teachers than professors. This is because TA’s are grad students, and grad students are far closer to our level of experience, knowledge, and expertise than professors. TA’s have, most likely, covered the same topic we’re covering within the past decade of their lives, so they know what it’s like for us undergrads encountering this for the first time. Professors, on the other hand, are often bored out of their minds covering this material. This is especially true of the best professors, who are ideally such geniuses that the material bored them the first time they encountered it, and who can only be truly stimulated at the frontiers of human knowledge. Of course, few professors really achieve that ideal. There are also, I am sure, those professors who are better teachers than researchers, but I am hardly the first to comment on the inefficiency of this aspect of academia.

The point is, that theory about TA’s makes a lot of sense all other things being equal. There are certainly other relevant factors, and this particular class makes me painfully aware that fluency in the English language is most certainly a relevant factor. While this is true of both TA’s and professors, anyone who has been at an American university long enough to be a professor should have become fluent enough in the language to be able to lecture coherently. TA’s don’t necessarily have that level of experience. Thankfully, I seem to be a lot better than most people at deciphering foreign accents, and the TA in this class seems to be getting more comfortable teaching in English.

Today, I discovered, for the first time in seventeen years, that my mother has an unsettling ability to speak in a Southern accent.

For another truly unsettling experience, contemplate Stephen Hawking as a rapper.