Without a doubt, the worst class I had in college was Sociology 101. Yes, it was even more painful than the public speaking course required for all majors. It wouldn't have been so bad if I had gotten the memo about Dr. Armstrong. Apparently most students knew better and avoided his classes like the plague, hence the mounds of seats still available when I was finally able to schedule my classes for that semester. I thought I was just lucky.
Dr. Armstrong was obnoxious, intimidating, and in some respects he conducted his class like an elementary school teacher. He closed, and locked, the classroom door at exactly 8:00. If you were late, you were shit out of luck and marked absent for the day. After all, he was a very important man and he would not tolerate any interruptions once he began speaking. There was no eating or drinking allowed in his class, and gum chewers faced the humiliation of wearing it on their nose, a consequence I hadn't encountered since the sixth grade. There was no chatting, no slouching, and no looking anywhere but directly at him while he lectured for ninety minutes straight with barely a pause to breathe. Unless, of course, someone broke one of his rules. Then his usual condescending tone became even more so as he went out of his way to make a fool of the offender.
He assigned a new chapter at the end of each Tuesday's class, and then every Thursday we faced a brutal quiz: one essay question from a 50-60 page textbook chapter before any of the material was even discussed in class. He graded them on a scale from one to ten, but he never gave tens because nobody's perfect. And nines were next to perfect so no one got those either. By midterm, I was dangerously close to failing the course. Between the fives and sixes I was averaging on the quizzes and the shocking C I managed to score on the midterm exam, I was in big trouble. I needed a new plan. A different approach. A way to beat this all-knowing professor at his own game.
I bought a tape recorder.
Go ahead and laugh, but it was a long time ago and students weren't carrying laptops to class back then. I used the only technology available at the time, and it paid off big time. For the rest of the semester, I diligently recorded his classes from start to finish. Even though I continued to pull mediocre quiz scores, my sights were set on the big picture. I was going to ace the final exam come hell or high water - partly because I really didn't want a D on my record, but mostly because it was the ultimate way to shut up Dr. Almighty.
The format of the exam was four essay questions, of which we had to answer three. I was determined to figure out what the questions would be. The week leading up to the final, I spent every night in the basement of my dorm, all alone in the dark, listening to the tapes of his lectures over and over again. What did he stress? What was he most passionate about? What did he talk about the longest? I settled on four potential questions with the hope of having three actually show up on the test, and then wrote my answers out ahead of time and committed them to memory.
I couldn't help the tiny squeal the escaped my throat when my eyes first saw the exam. All four of my prepared questions were on the test, so I was able to eliminate the one I liked least. I spent the next two hours spitting his words back to him verbatim, just as he said them in class. Just as I heard them over and over again on the tapes. Just as I had written them out the night before.
As I walked to his class for the last time, I practiced my argument in my head. There was no way I was settling for less than an A on the exam and I was fully prepared to challenge him, even if it meant playing my class tapes for the Dean. In true Armstrong style, he launched into a half-hour lecture before finally passing out the test scores, and with each passing moment my heart rose further into my throat. His lecture that day was all about how only one person in the entire class managed to understand a damn word he said all semester. One golden student who paid attention and digested the material. The class simply wasn't worth the time for the other students. Nothing landed in their heads. He wasted his breath on the lectures. He normally doesn't give A's because nobody's perfect, but one student's essays were so far above the rest that he had to make an exception this semester. And he thought it only fair to acknowledge that student in front of the rest of the class.
So I got an A on the final exam, with a side of public humiliation at no extra charge, and I ended up with a B as my final grade for the class. As a student that normally got A's with little effort , I have to say I'm more proud of that B than any A I ever got. I walked away from Dr. Armstrong's class with the satisfaction of knocking him down a peg, if only for a brief moment, and I learned to ask around about professors before blindly scheduling future semesters.
In terms of actual subject material, almost twenty years later there is only one thing I remember from his class. For whatever reason, I took one particular lesson to heart and it stuck with me all these years. According to the infallible Dr. Armstrong, the difference between blue-collar and white-collar parenting can be summed up in one four-word phase: Because I said so.
He claimed it perfectly illustrated the difference in mentality in the approach to child-rearing found between those with and without higher education. Blue-collar parents think their children should respect them simply because they are the parents and saying 'no' requires no further explanation. White-collar parents, on the other hand, teach their children to think about the consequences of their actions by providing explanations beyond 'because I said so.'
While I'm sure his assessment isn't one hundred percent accurate, I found it close when I applied it to the various families I've been exposed to over the years. I'm from a 'because I said so' family myself, with an occasional scare tactic thrown in for good measure. When I got my period for the first time at the ripe old age of eleven, and sat on the edge of the bed in tears because there was blood gushing from somewhere deep inside my body and exiting through a hole I never really knew existed and it felt like someone was stabbing my abdomen with a rusty butcher knife and I would surely be dead by morning, my mom's explanation went something along the lines of "This means you can now get pregnant, and if you get pregnant before you're married, your father and I will disown you." It would've helped if she explained exactly how that could happen. When I had my first real kiss nearly two years later, I cried for two weeks because I thought I was pregnant and soon to be homeless. I even packed a few things just in case.
I'm not saying my parents were bad parents, they just parented the way their parents did before them, but Dr. Armstrong's lecture on child-rearing stuck a deep chord with me long before I even considered having a child of my own. I don't want Punky to avoid situations because she's scared, I want her to avoid them because she understands what can happen if she doesn't. I don't want her to stop doing something simply because I told her to stop and my word is the be all and end all of her world, I want her to ask why so I can explain the reasons behind my words. I want to earn her respect instead of demanding it simply because I'm her mother. I want to guide her to make good decisions in life by educating her, not by demanding her obedience because I'm the parent and I said so.
I've made a conscious effort over the last three and a half years to try and explain why I tell her the things I do. I can't say I've never slipped and spewed a 'because I said so' ever, I mean, I'm not perfect and some days she's as challenging as all hell. But, I try my best to always provide at least one simple statement as to why I feel the way I do, and I try to be as honest as possible without painting her a horrific picture of blood, guts, and gore.
So, now I can finally get to the point of this entire long-winded post.
While I have to admit she is doing surprisingly well with the switch to a five-day school week that starts each morning at six-thirty, Punky was being particularly difficult this morning. She was supposed to be eating her waffle while I was getting dressed, but I returned to the kitchen to find a mere two bites gone. I told her she only had a few minutes left to eat, or she will have to wait until they serve breakfast as school. I headed to the bathroom once again, and called her a few minutes later to come and get ready for school. And again a minute later. And again a minute later. And again a minute later.
Once she finally arrived in the bathroom to make her morning pee, I went back to the kitchen to get my lunch ready for work. When I returned to the bathroom two minutes later, she was gone. She was hiding in my bed, under the covers, giggling her little tush off. She hadn't even peed yet. This time I supervised her toilet time, and we headed to her room to get dressed.
By the time we both got back to the bathroom to brush her teeth and comb her hair, we had exactly three minutes until we needed to pull out of the driveway. Of course, she arrived without her pants, the ones I just put on her thirty seconds earlier, so we lost another minute on the re-do. When I finally handed her the toothbrush, she dropped it and left a hot-pink blob of bubble gum toothpaste on my light green bathroom rug. As I knelt to clean it up, my eyes caught a glimpse of the clock. I was now likely to be late for work, and my patience was just about shot.
By no means did I yell, but my tone was surely stern as I began to rant about the morning's events.
"Punky, I let you sleep as long as I can in the morning. That means when it's time to get up, you need to get moving. There is no time for messing around. You need to eat your breakfast and get ready for school when I say so, or else I need to start waking you up even earlier if you insist on goofing off. This schedule is already hard on the both of us, let's not make it even worse. Mommy can't be late for work every day because you don't listen to me. My boss would be really mad. I might even get fired and we certainly can't afford that right now."
She immediately burst into tears. I mean real waterworks. Crying so hard I could barely understand what she was saying. I was in complete shock. I had no idea what I said to upset her so much. Finally I managed to calm her down enough to decipher her words.
"Mommy? If you're late for work, will I be on fire, too?"
Apparently she thought I would burst into flames if I walked into work a minute late, and she might as well by default since I blatantly blamed her for my tardiness.
Needless to say, it took me another ten minutes to calm her down and get out the door. I spent the five-minute drive to school apologizing profusely and explaining the definition of the word 'fired' in the context of employment. In the end, I was twenty minutes late for work but, lucky for me, my boss got a big kick out of Punky's theory of spontaneous combustion.
