Notation

I needed to use an old 3-prong folder I had in my closet for another educational endeavour. It was from my Grammar and Usage class I took a few years back. In the cull of usable materials, I found a few interesting things, one of which (the verb and tense exercise) I've already posted here.

I also found this on one of my note-taking pages: it is a somewhat....enhanced.....version of what the Grammar professor said in class, in the the Fall of 2002.

"Humans, being lazy bastards, wanting an easier way to say the sentence (as it is so much easier to say five words than six), decide to place the indirect object in front of the direct object."

I'm pretty bad at taking notes. Always have been.

Part of it was this....I'm a good listener and I'd reckon that I could remember just as well what was said in most classes just as well as most of those who relied on their notes. It served me fairly well...I always made good grades.

Mostly, I took notes out of habit, or to be polite. I find that it disturbs and irks some professors for you not to take notes, and to stare at them intently while they lecture.

See, when it come to notes, I either don't pay enough attention, and my notes (work or school) are covered with doodles or lists or portions of stories or snippets of dialogue or anything else other than what it is I'm supposed to be taking notes on.

That, or I'm hyper-attentive, overcompensating for my laziness, and in this state, my pen actually goes faster than what the speaker is speaking, and it's filled with mid-sentence editorializing like what we witness above.

Looking back, I have a hard time believing that my professor called people "lazy bastards" or making a sarcastic parenthetical statement. But I can't be sure....those academics occasionally get salty every now and then.....

We'll just assume it's my poor note-taking.

My notation has gotten me undue attention. I remember having a class in public policy, and as a class, we were sitting in a circle.

One of my classmates was going off on some ultra-conservative rant, and I made a note in the margin of my notepad: "I wonder if he can tell me what the Hitler Youth are wearing these days?" And my professor, who just happened to be sitting next to me in the ring happened to look over at my notepad, saw what I'd written, and started to laugh to the point of confusing all the rest of the class.

Had another class, a Mass Media Law class, where a classmate asked to borrow my notes from a previous class that she'd had to miss. I gave her my notes after class. She returned them to me in another class we'd had together, and she apologized, because she hadn't been able to decipher whatever code and tongue it was I'd written my notes in.

The sad part was, I couldn't help her much when I looked at what I'd written, either.

Probably the worst incident, I'd believed until recently, of my notes getting me in trouble was an American Lit class. In this class, the professor liked to roam about the classroom as he lectured.

We were discussing Daisy Miller, and since reading Henry James and sandpapering the asshole of an alligator in a phone booth run neck and neck on my least favorite things to do list, I wasn't in particularly keen listening form that afternoon.

Instead of actually taking notes, listening to the lecture and participating in any class discussion, I was making a list.

A list of my favorite breakfast cereals.

I'd listed around 25 cereals, and was in the process of making a rough ranking of them when I realized that the professor had stopped lecturing. It was one of those thick silences that seeps into every sense organ and hurts the ears in particular. I looked up to see the folks in front of my desk turned and looking in my direction. The rest of my senses perked up just enough for my personal space radar to tell me that this particular professor was looming just over my right shoulder (this professor was 6'8" and he could loom like nobody's business).

I turn.

"You've been pretty quiet today, Mr. Acuff" the professor says.

"Yep," is all I could manage.

"I'm impressed with your note-taking ability."

I laughed. Just one of those nervous laughs that pleads with the aggressor to just to get this little torture overwith, so that we can both move on.

"My wife won't let me eat anything but Bran Flakes or Shredded Wheat."

I nod. (Looking back, this had to have been quite the bizarre statement for the rest of the class).

"Please try to keep up, and I'll try not to embarrass you any further."

"Sure thing," I said.

I saw that professor recently at the K-Mart here in town. He's since retired, but he did remember my name, and he brought up the cereal incident.

He said that he'd noticed me writing intently while he lectured. He knew that I wasn't the type of student that normally took or needed to take his notes so intently, so he was extremely curious to find out what it was that I had been writing.

When he got there, it threw him for such a loop that I was making a list of breakfast cereals that he forgot where he was in his lecture. And after class, he and a couple of professors had had a good laugh over the whole thing.

Which would explain a great many things in my dealings with the English department since then.

Anyway. I don't really have a point. Mostly I saw the quote I listed above and just started rambling.

I'm done rambling. Go do something contructive with your day.