Long gone are the days of brutal honesty when you could tellyour teachers just exactly where you were during class and what youwere doing there -- the days when they would accept your excuse andmove on, regardless of how lame it was. The point was that itshowed integrity that you were honest -- a skill the teacher wasattempting to reward.
Now that the days of college are here, I'm finding that societyhas warped the absentee policy just a bit, to where the dramaticexcuse you come up with, not honesty, is rewarded.
Last semester, in my all-too-early French class, I constantlyfound myself hearing the alarm clock, abusing it profusely andcruelly, and then when it was silenced, allowing myself to slipback into untroubled sleep and forget about my class. When I didattend class, the line of questioning had already been establishedby my professor.
"Why weren't you here last time?"
I would gauge the question in my head, attempting to decipher ifthis woman could handle the truth. I decided that everyone is wortha test run.
"I slept in."
"That's not an excuse," she would say with validation.
The next time the same thing happened, I decided to use my priorexperience and apply some well-learned wisdom.
"My grandmother died of a stroke around 7:03 p.m. Wednesday. Mymother and I had to immediately leave for our American Airlinescoach flight at 7:45 a.m., just before your class."
This, surprisingly, was rewarded with an apologetic look and anesteeming expression because I had apparently memorized my travelagenda.
Are our professors trying to get the most entertaining storiesout of us for our absence excuses? In their boredom of gradingpapers and planning lectures, are professors looking for thatamusing and unrealistic break in the monotony?
Even I know that the grandmother story had been played out. Howmany of us haven't had six grandmothers die already, with anotherthree on reserve in case of an impulse travel trip? I believe itwas just the addition of inane details that kept my professorentertained.
"Now that's effort in that lie," I can hear her thinking.
Missing class is an honest reality of college because itrequires a discipline most college students don't care to develop.When it happens though, all students should remember it'sapparently the more elaborate lie that will win. It helps me toreplace "hangover" with "head injury," "slept in" with "grandmotherdied," and "didn't feel like going" with "I have cancer."
