Welcome back to school

“This second exam will be the hardest of your life.”

Thus my professor welcomed us to Macroeconomics last night. But that is the middle of the story; let’s jump back to the beginning.

At a few minutes past 7, the professor, a gray-haired man with a slight face, goatee, and a stomach that poked out a bit above the belt, limped into the room (he favored his right leg) and approached the board. He had a half smile as he walked across the front of the room, paused, turned, and then walked back to the other side. He silently repeated this, the same slight grin on his face, the same slow gait. He limped back to the door, looked around, then slowly limped back to the front.

“Is this it?” he asked. “Well, maybe this will be good. You wouldn’t believe my last class.”

And then began the strangest rant I’ve ever heard a professor embark upon. He lamented the two sections he had in the fall, both of which were great disappointments who did not try very hard and performed so badly on the aforementioned second exam that he was unable to go any further with his plan and had to re-teach that material (the only time that had happened in 25 years of teaching, he said). He explained how he spent much of his break alternatively crying and thinking of new ways to structure the class. He grabbed the cord attached to the pull-down screen and said he could use that if our class followed that course (although to my eyes, the knot at the end of the cord was much too small a noose to actually be functional). And after all of this, he said that he was in good spirits. His knee was acting up, so he had taken a steady dose of pain killers, but otherwise he was in a great mood, he assured us.

My classmates and I nervously and softly laughed throughout this manic presentation that ranged from despair to hopeful anticipation. After scaring us with the second exam story that left most of us stone-faced and unsure what we’d gotten into, he tried to calm our fears. “It’s okay to smile,” he said, as if sensing our unease. “I’m a fun guy. People tell me I’m a fun guy.”

As if to prove the point, he popped the cap off one of his markers and took a great sniff. “Want some?” he asked the quiet girl in the front of the class. She politely refused (as if there were another way to refuse this sort of offer) the black marker, so he graciously offered the green. “Mint? There’s also cherry,” he said reaching for the red.

With his spirits high (pardon the pun), he dove right into Gross Domestic Product. And forever, when I hear someone discussing GDP, I will think of my new professor: the wobbly, marker-sniffing, manic lecturer desperate for us to make sense of Keynes.