I Unwittingly Give A Pregnant Student Anxiety


You would think that after yesterday's debacle, I'd have learned my lesson, but today in Creative Writing class I was demonstrating some point about sensory detail and-- spurred by a line in the instructive essay we were reading that portrayed birth as a wonderful, joyous event . . . I decided to provide a counter-example-- and so I launched into a graphic description of my son Alex's birth, which was pretty hairy: the umbilical cord was wrapped several times around his neck and the staff had to toss Catherine back and forth like a sack of potatoes to try to loosen it so he wouldn't suffocate, and then the doctor said, "You've got three pushes to get this baby out or we're going to have to do an emergency C-section!" and somewhere in the middle of this visceral tale I looked down and noticed that one of my new students, a chubby girl, was turning green and looked like she was going to pass out, and then I noticed why . . . she wasn't chubby, she was very very pregnant, but it was too late, I was already deep into the story and so I had to finish it (and I talked to her later and told her I was sorry and that I didn't meant to scare her and she said the story wasn't as horrific as she first thought it was going to be) but the real question is who am I going to target tomorrow?

2 comments:

rob said...

tomorrow on a very special 'sentence of dave': a dramatic recreation of the final scene of 'heathers', presented as a true story to scare the bejeezus out of the cool kids in dave's class. because why should they be immune to his savage humiliations?

Dave said...

as george bush was fond of pointing out, it's really hard to talk all day and not say something stupid.

A New Sentence Every Day, Hand Crafted from the Finest Corinthian Leather.