There used to be a time when writing 20 pages scared me. I had such a
phobia of looking back at my own writing that I would submit work
without even proofreading it. To make it all worse, I needed a
writing credit to graduate. So sophomore year I decided to take
English 114, a class full of freshmen.
All of the slots for Eng 114 fly-by pretty quickly, so you basically get stuck with whatever professor is available. I had the good fortune of getting stuck with one angry feminist by the name of Allyson Polsky-McCabe. Profiling is something liberal elites preach against, but I should have profiled her the minute I sat in her class. She has that short, silver hairdo and genderless black garb that screams: "counter-society lesbian." And sure, I should have dropped the class and trusted my instincts, but that liberal brainwashing was at-the-time getting to me.
To say that Polsky had no sense of humor would be an understatement. She once asked the class one of her dry questions and I answered: "you can't trust the government," to everyone's amusement. She responded in her passive aggressive tone: "you can be paranoid." The woman had a complete inability to tell the difference between satire and reality.
She once sent an email to my dean complaining about one of my essays. In her email to my dean, Polsky quoted something I wrote along the lines of: "Van Gogh was on absinthe, why should we trust what he had to say?" My dean responded: "I don't see what she means by this," with a confused look on her face. Again, I should have dropped the class right there, but I decided to spend the rest of the semester having more fun with Polsky.
At Yale you can drop a class just a couple of weeks before the semester ends, and it's not weighed against your grade point average. Throughout the rest of the semester, I pretended to be a rich, uppity yuppie. I once jokingly told Polsky: "Some Brazilian students are visiting and our Portuguese professor wants us to take them to our favorite class."
When the Brazilian student came in, Polsky had completely forgotten about it, and was unprepared. At the end of the class, the Brazilian student remarked: "that boring class is taught here... at Yale!" Yep, Yale lost a recruit right then and there, but it doesn't matter, there are 20,000 more waiting to take her place.
After that visit came the last paper of the term, and although the class was on something related to art, I decided to write about how detached I was from homelessness because I'm from a small island. Polsky sends me an email after reading the essay telling me that she wants to meet. She begins by saying, "I don't know how they do things where you're from," and I began laughing because despite all of her liberal self-righteousness, I got that incriminating statement out of her.
