She showed up to class dressed up like some ridiculous nightmarish clown. Pinks and blacks and purples with rings and straps and dangling bits. It was an outfit that should be restricted to dark nightclubs in out of the way places frequently raided by police. Definitely not appropriate for the middle of the day, especially the day of an exam. I can only assume she wore this because she would be going home to her family that day, the day before Thanksgiving, and wanted to shock them with her crazy ways. Sure, because dressing in a way not unlike rebels from thirty or more years ago, only cuted up, is a way to be edgy.
I've been seeing students do their best to dress like idiots for years. This shouldn't have bothered me. But she came in to the room and smiled and waved at me, as though we were friends or something. She probably is the type of person to tearfully hug all of her teachers at the end of the semester. During the test, she made the most ridiculous faces, frowning, smiling, looking off thoughtfully, contorting them all in a cartoon-like fashion. It was distracting. Thankfully she had her usual spot in the back of the room, so she didn't disturb too much of the class.
At one point she turned a page in the test, scribbled for a bit, then looked up at me. She looked serious for just a brief moment, then smiled and nodded. What sort of inside joke does she think she shares with me? Does she think she's somehow bonded with me over the course of the semester? She is nothing to me but an insect I can't wait to crush underfoot.
She did not finish first out of the class. Instead, she seemed to wait until her friends were mostly done. I watched them for any sign of cheating, but saw nothing. They each had substantially different tests, so any copying would be painfully obvious.
When she finally handed in her test, she smiled and thanked me. What is with this sudden friendliness? I looked down at her exam. Like her homework, the cover page was littered with pictures of butterflies and fairies. I flipped through the test and saw unicorns and rainbows and other wastes of time. She apparently felt she had plenty of time to not only complete the test, but doodle multiple pictures on every single page.
Her whole test was far and away more difficult than any other test in the pile, but there was one problem in the middle that was especially nasty. It was an implicit differentiation problem involving finding tangent lines at a point of multiple self-intersections. Beneath the problem, before her solution, she wrote, "Nice one." What is this? Does this think she can critique my work? What arrogance.
This has to stop, now. Rather than giving her her test back, I'm going to call her into my office to discuss it. She will most likely expect me to chastise her about her doodles in the exam, but I will show her worse than that earlier student. I will destroy her, and she will no longer be a thorn in my flesh. I will be rid of her.
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