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  I caption classes for college students, which involves setting up two laptops, one for me, one for the student, connecting them with a wireless connection, and typing anything anyone says for the entire class.
I stand outside the lecture hall, waiting for the students from the previous class to file out. One after the other they flip open their cell phones and disappear, as if being beamed up to the mother ship. I drag my rolling computer case into the lecture hall and begin to set up. I always set up in the center, behind the last row, with my back against the wall. The back of the hall is where students go to not pay attention. The last row fills the fastest.
Students shuffle in, pouting, staring off into the distance, caressing their Ipods and Iphones. “Ziss seat taken?” they say to each other. “Zat seat taken?” Laptops flip open and blink on, always awake. In front of me, a girl with straight dyed blond hair leans urgently into the screen, as if to climb through and into Wonderland. The girl beside her gathers up her hair into a ponytail and twists it, twists it again, and clips it up with a plastic clip, so that a big curl of hair tumbles out of it and onto her neck. She itches her scalp. She pulls the clip out, runs her fingers through her hair, and gives it another shot: gathers it into a ponytail, twists it, twists it again, abandons the effort. Scratches her scalp, tosses her hair back, runs her fingers through it. Scratches her scalp. She pulls it into a ponytail a third time, and secures it, this time, with an elastic hair tie. There. Third time’s a charm. Now she can concentrate. “Are you gonna come over tonight? Come over!” says a girl to my right. Her friend mutters a reply. “Oh, come ohh verrr!” “My Dad said he’d give me a hundred bucks if I pass this course,” says the boy in the last row to the girl with the ponytail. “Oh my God,” she says. Her hand flies behind her head and down goes the ponytail. The guy beside me drops his pencil, but doesn’t pick it up. I glance at his hand where it hangs to his side: he’s asleep, chin on chest. The professor arrives, off in the distance under the harsh lights at the front of the hall. He’s Chinese, and his English is grammatically correct, fluent, except that he tends to skip articles, and his accent could use some work. The first week or two I had to strain to understand him. Still, I have enough experience in college classes to know he’s a pretty good lecturer -- organized, enthusiastic. Yet his accent makes the kids in the back row giggle. He loses them easily. 
“Herro?” he says, testing the microphone. “Herro?” “Last time, we talked about eclipses,” he begins. “Keep quiet, please. Last time, we talked about eclipses. For an eclipse to happen, you need a light source, and an opaque material to block it. Please quiet down.” Two seats away a female student opens an email entitled “Get Big Penis” and deletes it. The guy directly in front of me starts a game of solitaire. The ponytail girl gathers up her hair, twists it, lets it fall. Gathers it up, twists it, lets it fall. Four rows down, a girl sticks her tongue in her boyfriend’s ear. I’ve got my work cut out for me. |
Karen Condon
