Lazy students got what they deserved!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have a theater history class in college. It fulfills either upper division units for English Majors (like me) or Theater Majors. It turns out I’m the only student in that class that isn’t a Theater Major. All of the other students are actors in the college plays, or have some other hand in it (costuming/makeup/etc).

We had an assignment due today which involved us getting into groups and doing a five-mintute scene from Tartuffe. Two weeks ago we were given scripts for our scenes and told we better have our part down flawlessly (she was originally only giving us a week and a half to memorize it, but extended it to give us an extra weekend to polish it). I worked very hard on my part; I’m not used to memorizing lines because I’m not a theater major, and while I do read plays in some classes we rarely are made to act out long scenes from them. So I figured I had an uphill battle on this- I wasn’t as experienced and totally unfamiliar with the play. I figured I would be the only one flubbing my lines, since many of the other students were actually complaining their parts were too brief/short for their tastes :eek: Many of them droned on how easy this was, and any real actor wouldn’t have the level of concern I did about making sure it was done right.

This morning each group presented their scene to the instructor. Before class, one student remarked, “I hope she doesnt make it to class so we don’t have to present”. I replied, “I hope she sure as hell does make it to class because I didn’t spend all of last weekend memorizing this for nothing!” :mad: In addition, I have been wracked with agonizing intestinal pain, but I couldn’t stay home because I’d get an ‘F’ in that class if I didn’t show to present my scene, and my other class had a midterm, so it was too important a day to stay home sick. I just had to hope I could get through the day without crapping myself due to alarmingly spontaneous attacks of diarrhea :eek:

Despite the pain I was in, I was able to perform my part as well as I had hoped. To my surprise, almost none of the other groups had completely memorized their scenes- many of them had their scripts in their hand, or even asked for the next line. When everyone was done, the professor was furious. Everyone was expected to memorize their lines, and since they were not only Theater majors, but Seniors, it should not have come as a difficult or unusual task for them. Here’s what she said-

“That was garbage. Everyone except John, Jane, Rick, Larry and Incubus :eek: :smiley: didn’t know what the hell they were doing. You really blew it people. You had two weeks to work on this. If this assignment is any indication, I suggest you pursue some other element of theater, such as the technical areas, or anything that does not involve you having to act, because it is clear that very few of you are capable of demonstrating it to me.”

She also pointed out to the class that the only non-theater oriented student (me)in the entire class was able to do a good job. I felt kind of wierd about it. I’m not trying to brag about how great I did, because honestly the whole time I was acting I was feeling overwhelmed by pain and stress that I thought I screwed up, and that other actors’ perfect performances would surely make ours pale in comparison. It was an extrmeely surreal moment, and I am kind of at a loss as to how so many people that are supposedly 100x more serious about this than I am could screw up so badly… :confused:

2

Reminds me of the choir leader from my university after a final rehearsal before our spring concert(at Carnegie Hall!). Dozens of music majors in the class. People with lead roles in the university musicals and opera productions. I’m taking the class for a lark, but I’ve got my part down cold. Usually we’re allowed to use the sheet music in black binders, but he’s been harping on us to get it memorized. This leaves the music majors, who can all sightread the music, a huge crutch. Today he says “no music”. We start in and people start stumbling all over themselves. I just chug along, keeping eye contact with the conductor like a good little performer. Pretty soon I realize that I’m getting a little squeezed by all the guys leaning in to be able to hear me better so they can follow my lead. I up the volume a little bit. The tenors are leaning towards the basses(my section), the altos are leaning towards the tenors, the sopranos are leaning towards the altos(SATB arrangement). When we finish the professor puts down his baton and says, with a fair bit of disappointment in his voice, “There is all of ONE person in the room who knows this music.” One of the showboat music majors jumps off the riser and points at me. Professor remarks “Thank you, STUDENT, for indicating so clearly that it was not you.”

:smiley:

I liked that prof, he was really cool. He never got tough with the group and made them put their binders away though. I always wished he had.

Enjoy,
Steven

3

Similar story to Mtgman…I played tuba in symphonic band in college, and eventually got to where I didn’t need to read the sheet music anymore. I got familiar with the piece because I would listen to the music as a whole, rather than concentrate solely on my part. The director would sometimes single me out and get me to play tricky parts the music majors couldn’t handle.

I wasn’t playing the notes. I was playing the music.

I miss performing.

4

Nuts.

I was always one of the lazy ones. This thread brings back some bad memories.
:frowning:

C’mon everyone! Lets beat up Incubus, **Mtgman ** and **Knowed Out ** for making us look bad in front of our professors.
:mad: :wink: :smiley:

5

I’m starting to wonder about theater majors.

I had a horrendous room-scheduling snafu at the beginning of this semester that would have been solved quite simply if the 75-student theater class next door would have traded rooms with my 90-student class. The professor refused because it would have meant he’d move into a slightly smaller lecture hall, and he says that because of the way he teaches his class, he can’t control the students unless he can seat them every other seat. This was a 400-level theater class, which means it’s for juniors and seniors. Upperclassmen, taking a class in their major can’t freakin’ sit still and be quiet for 50 minutes unless he makes them sit every other seat like it’s junior high?

Either theater majors are immature losers, or this guy can teach worth a crap . . . or maybe I really don’t wanna know what goes on in that classroom.

6

Re: Mtgman

In high school, I did choir. I could sight read, but I learned the parts anyway because of the repetition done for the non-sight readers in the choir. After a couple of weeks, it got to the point where I knew everyone’s parts so I could go “here, this is what you’re supposed to be singing. Learn you part” whenever the person next to me would start flubbing notes. It got bad enough that I was known in musicals as the person who could be put on just about any part she could sing. The last musical I was in had me on Soprano 1, altos 1 and 2, and tenors 1 and 2. There were quite a few songs in that show, and I was a good filler chorus-wise.

7

This thread reminds me of an upper level undergrad English class I was in. It was Studies in Drama and pretty crowded with Theater types. I was one of maybe two or three full English majors in the class. The day after we turned in our first paper, the professor came in looking gray and disgruntled, said “You need this more than I” and started passing out grammar guides to various students around the room. These were almost all seniors, by the way.

8

Sounds familiar. I can’t count the number of times I was asked to sing Tenor I although I’m a Baritone. State competitions for UIL my senior year had me singing Tenor I with the acapella chior, Bass with the show choir, Tenor II with a quartet, and Baritone on my own solo. Musicals were even crazier. I generally inherited the role of whoever was not available for rehearsal and sang as many as three parts(including the part of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof) during rehearsals to keep the flow going. There was serious talk for having me be an offstage voice that one of the other characters would lip synch to because he couldn’t do the part. I couldn’t actually play both because I already had a major role. He got a voice coach and managed to do it on his own, but it was up in the air until about a week before opening night.

I generally tried to avoid coaching other people on their parts unless they asked me to. I’m not the teacher. About the most primadonnaish thing I ever did was refuse to back off on the volume when everyone around me was being self-conscious and giving half-effort. I told the teacher I didn’t feel I was doing anything wrong by performing at the level I was and if the guys around me would perform to their potential as well there wouldn’t be a problem at all. She agreed with me in rehearsal and tried to get the others up to snuff, but when it came to performance she told me to “blend or else”. The most ironic part is that by the time my quartet performance came around at State competition I was so burned out(six performances already that day, and a long road trip) that I could only manage about half my usual level. This would have been great except all the other guys suddenly decided to give it their all and my lead tenor part got buried in an avalance of baritone which came out of nowhere.

Oh well. These days I use my classically trained lyric baritone to sing the kids to sleep and that’s about it. I guess it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had been a slacker instead of an overachiever in school.

Enjoy,
Steven

9

Theater…snicker…

10

First of all: nicely done, Incubus. There’s too much bitchin’ and not enough workin’ going on in far too many college level classes these days. And now, my shameless “me too” moment.

I was a mechanical engineer in college, taking 18 credits each semester just to meet my distribution requirements. Then, at the end of junior year, I finally got one of the deans to accept my ROTC classes as “leadership and management” electives. Suddenly, I found that 12 credits of electives had been added to my transcript, and that I could take any course I wanted senior year. So I signed up for “Introduction to Poetic Forms.”

In the registration booklet, the course specifically said “No more than 12 students.” It specifically said “Must have permission from instructor.” So I went straight to his office as soon as I read that, asked if I could take his class, and it turns out his dad had been a mechanical engineer. He was delighted to have a non-major in the class I got one of the coveted seats (yay!).

About five weeks into the class, I was still holding my own, and we were tasked to write in one of the new forms we’d been shown. Mired in my senior design project, I couldn’t get the image of my project’s skeletal aluminum frame out of my head, especially when the sun would set and the lab would get dark with all that red light all over the metal… so I wrote my poem about that, even though I was worried that the others wouldn’t really understand the spookiness of it. Class came, we passed around our poems, and the next week, I got lots of great comments back – some highly predictable, like “this is so vivid, it’s like you’ve really worked there!” – and got to explain, when the professor asked, that I really did spend most of my time in the design lab.

Shocked expressions all around. One classmate actually said something along the lines of, “but you can’t be! Your poetry is actually GOOD!” Later on I got crap from one of them about “taking her roommate’s spot”. I explained as politely as I could that I had gone to the professor like everyone else, and that her roommate obviously didn’t want the course that badly if she didn’t (a) see the professor or (b) show up for the first day to look for empty seats.

11

A friend of mine is working on her MFA in film. Last year, for a directing class, everyone in the class needed to direct a scene from a play. She got students majoring in acting at her school to be her guinea pigs but one of them dropped out at the last minute. She was desperate, so I offered to take the part since I was unemployed at the time and not doing anything useful. I am NOT an actor.

After the performance (we had to memorize all the lines and have costumes and props and lighting and everything), several of my friend’s classmates complimented me on our scene, and seemed surprised when I told them I’m not really an actor. I was so pleased. It absolutely made my day - I worked hard to do something I’m not experienced in and didn’t even completely screw up! My friend even asked me to voice over a character for another film later!

12

Congrats, Incubus. Well Done. :slight_smile: :cool: Out of curiosity, what were the repercussions on the lazy seniors in your class? Given that they’re seniors and theatre majors, I assume this fulfills some course requirement for them…

13

Well, first and foremost, I think all of the other groups got a big fat ‘F’ on the assignment, because one of the requirements was memorize the lines. She wasn’t evaluating on how well we remembered the lines, she was evaluating us on how well we acted out the scenes. I’m also pretty certain that she isn’t going to cut anybody any slack, since she gave us extra time to work on this assignment and many people still botched it. So I’m betting that whatever future project we do is going to be evaluated with an enormous amoun of scrutiny.

One funny thing was that so many people thought that she would not even make it to class on time. The professor commutes from San Francisco, and has to drive down roughly a 50-mile stretch of highway 101 or highway 280 during rush hour to get to San Jose State University. The day of the assignment had pouring rain, and on the news there were numerous accidents along both highways. However, nobody had the common sense to think that the professor might have anticipated this happening, and so left her house early to be sure to get there on time. Its funny that she lives 50+ miles away, and yet can get to class before some students who live a mere city block from campus…they simply don’t have a leg to stand on excuse-wise :stuck_out_tongue:

14

I’ve got a me too, too. While taking my pre-requisites for nursing school, as long as I stayed full time my tuition was fully covered from various sources. That meant I always ended up taking one or two electives to get the required full time credits.

One semester I took a 200 level map-making course, thinking that is sounded intersting and hey, how hard can a 200 level course be? Well. Turns out this particular course was a core geography major course, was very challenging, and all of the other students were geography majors, some taking the course for the second time.

Out of a class of 25, there were 3 A’s, one of which was me. I don’t think I’ve ever worked that hard at an elective in my life.

15

I don’t know very much about theatre majors etc, but I do know enough to say the Incubus should be congratulated for his/ her effort. And I hope it continues to pay rewars. Well done, but let us know how you go from here on in.

Who says virtue is it’s own reward? And to have a bad attack of gastric as well…