Cell Phone Innovation

I just have to write about an incident that happened today in my planning class. It has the potential of being a “had to have been there” story, so I am going to carefully lay out the background.

Ever since the VA Tech massacre, there’s been sort’ve an uneasiness around campus. Everyone talks about the “what ifs” and the “just imagines” and the “what would we dos?” One of my professors was especially shaken by it, and she’s made reference to it several times in her lectures.

Now she just happens to be the professor whose classes are extra tough, and many of the students dread sitting under her for an hour and twenty minutes twice a week. She is well aware of it and has made quite a few comments that she knows she is not our favorite professor. One-on-one she is a fine person—it’s just her teaching style (or lack thereof) that nearly drives us stark raving mad.

One of the good things about her is that she gives us these pass/fail quizzes. You pass if you can manage to get one more right than you get wrong. Then for every quiz you pass throughout the semester, she adds a point onto your final grade average. Students are very fond of that. The drawback, however, is that we do not get to keep the quizzes to study for the test. Instead, we are only allowed to look at them briefly, and then we must turn them back in before we leave the classroom. She usually has her graduate assistant prepare a Power Point presentation and she goes over the quiz that way, then passes out the quizzes, and then two to three minutes later, she picks them up again.

There are different methods students use to try to get the information down anyway. One of them is to frantically scribble down at least the ones you missed. That’s the only one I was aware of until last week. Apparently, some of them bring their cameras to class and take photos of the quiz. I have to admit I never thought of that. Then there was the method that I noticed today.

I was sitting at the back of the classroom listening to Dr. P when I noticed two guys at the front aiming their cell phones at the screen where the Power Point presentation was. Pretty innovative, I thought I poked Adam who was sitting beside me, and together we laughed at them. Dr. P was busy lecturing about why the question was “false” when we had all, as usual, said “true.” Then she all of a sudden noticed these two cell phones waving about, trying to get just the right angle.

She stopped short, took a step back, and asked, “What are you doing?”

One of the guys said, “Taking a picture of the screen.”

I held my breath because I would have assumed that that would be a Big Problem.

She asked, “Why?”

He said, “Because you don’t let us take our quizzes home to study.”

In my head I went, Eek! I knew it was coming then. But oddly enough, she only breathed a sigh of relief, and said in her thick Russian accent,

“Ohh. Well, just write it down. I thought you were taking a picture of ME and were going to use it to get me killed!”

We absolutely HOWLED. Her Russian sense of humor does not always match our American sense of humor, and so laughter in her classroom is a bit of a rarity. Whenever she does make a joke, she has to tell us that it is, in fact, a joke. “I’m keeding—I’m keeding,” she’ll say periodically.

But not so today. There was even one guy on the other side of the room who put new meaning to the phrase, shout with laughter. And there were a handful of us who had much difficulty getting over it. Amidst the howls of laughter, she gave a little shudder, and then just as seriously as anything said, “I am still so shaken up by that shooting! You know?”

As we all are.

But for that one moment, despite (or perhaps because of) all the misery we have gone through in that particular classroom, we felt a sense of camaraderie that we’ve never felt before. And we looked at her with perhaps a larger measure of grace and simply enjoyed the moment.