“Write about a brief but scary encounter with one of your old professors.”
Anthony Yezer was the first economics professor I ever had, and he still scares the bejeezus out of me. He’s one of those stereotypical professors in that he’s so aptly lost in academia and has no real ability to express the simplest of economic ideas to a novice like I was my first semester freshman year of college. He’d start lecturing to a group of something like 200 students and prattle on for a solid 90-minute period about God knows what. The first few weeks I tried to follow along, the next few weeks I simply glazed over when he started talking, and finally I just stopped going to the class because I learned that I could at least read the book (or sleep with it under my pillow) and at least glean something from that exercise. It was truly one of those excruciating classes that people talk about, though I hadn’t yet experienced the true horror until Introduction to Microeconomics with Professor Yezer.
Because he was so lost in his own world of academia, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a true interaction with him besides turning in a problem set for exam. God, the problem sets! A friend and I would meet the weekend before they were due and try to knock them out. The first time we met I was helplessly lost and I was hoping she’d give me some sort of idea of where to look. Can you believe she was just as lost as I was?? Great! Something like fifty word problems that we had to solve and neither of us had any idea what we were doing!
It took me back to my senior year of high school where I somehow thought it’d be a good idea to take AP Physics from another equally awful teacher. When we had labs, I’d start scribbling things down and at the end the physics teacher wanted us to do something called a t-test, which apparently would somehow measure a percentage of how far off your lab results were from the real answer. When I started getting numbers like 1300% I knew I was a lost cause.
Okay, back to Yezer…<shudder>. My friend and I would scribble some cock-and-bull answers to the questions Yezer would give us on the problem set and then laugh about how ridiculously awful our answers were, yet they were solved to the best of our ability. I would literally giggle under my breath when I turned in my homework for that class because some pour grad student would be grading some truly atrocious work. Sadly, that wasn’t the worst work I ever turned in during my undergraduate years.
I’m not sure the babbling I’ve been doing for this entry really satisfies the ‘assignment,’ yet that’s the beauty of creative writing—you just start writing and whatever comes out is really what you were meant to say from the beginning. It’s rather rewarding in that sense, you can interpret the prompt any way you’d like and then share some random memory or thought. I will leave the reader with this last thought: Professor Yezer is to me as the Dementors are to Harry Potter. They suck the living soul out of you and literally feed on that energy.
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