Head Banging Nerds
It is not
startling, nor is it appalling to those who regularly travel through this antiquated
campus, when they see the sidewalks, hallways and classrooms crowded with extraordinary
swollen-headed students, so weird. These students consist of everyone from the sorority
girls that stand around between classes chatting and snapping gum, to the lab
rats that spend their extra time analyzing the over-analyzed. There’s no doubt
the majority of this student body has boosted egos, but that doesn’t justify
the size of their enormous heads; otherwise, campuses around the country would
have gigantic-headed pupils, and that just isn’t the case.
Let me explain. Only this campus,
nestled far in the woods, atop a hill, in the deep corner of South Carolina, holds
the unique feature of having bloated-headed students. So I figured there had to
be another reason for such an abundance of enlarged-headed students. Just over
a year ago these startling answers came to haunt my eyes. I think it is agreed
by all that a university’s reputation helps override the ridiculous acceptance
process and the abundance of trying to prove one’s worthiness. After six hundred
hours of filling out paperwork and anxiously waiting, you hopefully get
accepted to this college, which, to most is held as one of the best of its kind.
But there’s something the university withholds from prospective students, until
it sneakily receives and locks up in their vault your first pile of cash. It is
time for students to find out what kind of atrocity looms in their future.
As for my own experience, negotiating
with money lenders eventually led me to having an a Wells Fargo truck back up
to the admissions office. It dumped out a mountain of cash and allowed me to be
a real student. On my first day I found a lonely parking spot behind the monstronomous
football stadium, and with a map in hand, headed up, up, and further up. Finally,
I reached the Hall with the tall bell tower. The voice of a cheerful girl
invited me in and guided me to stand in a long line. I was taken back as my
eyes caught site of her extremely massive head. Everyone in the orientation
line had normal-sized heads. But she was huge above the neck, and I assumed this
girl was just an extra-brainy student or maybe had medical issues.
A few days later it was my first day of
class and unfortunately, upon registering, I found that the only classes not
filled were the ones before the cock crows. So as the sun rose on the first
day, I made my way up the hill again and was on a mission to succeed. That’s
when my eyes were exposed to something right out of a twisted nursery rhyme, I
saw my first student. He was tall and dressed quite well. There was an older
man with a corduroy jacket and long beard who walked at the student’s side. The
old man’s beard ran down past his belt and stopped at his knees. Even more
shocking was the tall student’s head. It was large, too large. It was so gigantic
that if I had to compare it to a ball, it could easily be a beach ball. Oddly,
his neck was stretched beyond its normal length, and his head was bent all the way
over to his side. It rested in a wheelbarrow, of which the bearded man in
corduroy pushed. I was dumbfounded and ran into the nearest building, where
thankfully there was an elderly secretary woman.
“Can I help you?” she asked, in a tone letting
me know I was bothering her morning routine.
“Ma’am, please look out your window and
tell me if you see something askew!”
She reluctantly stood up and gazed out
the window. That’s precisely when the gigantic-headed fellow and bearded man
with the wheelbarrow came strolling into sight.
“Oh, that’s Professor Niptz and one of
his star students. That student has been here for six short years, but I’m
pretty certain he’s a senior now.”
Her southern accent was strong and she
spoke at an alarmingly slow rate.
She continued, “This school certainly
proves to be a challenge to most, even the smart ones.”
She looked at my face and saw how pale
I must have turned.
“You’re new here, aren’t you boy. You
still have a lot to learn, don’t you?”
Though she was throwing out some
rhetoric, I was uncertain if she was talking about the deformities of the
possibly inbred student or the future challenges of the school. But after listening
to her, I think I knew why her head wasn’t enlarged like that students. Maybe I
was learning?
I made it to class. Most the student’s
heads ranged from the size of a basketball up to an exercise ball. The other bit
seemed mostly normal-sized. The one sitting across from me had shiny titanium
rods. The rods ran from his shoulders to the base of his skull and supported
his head in a most gracefully disturbing way. The rest of the students were either
leaning their heads onto their hands or had their fat craniums lopped over and lying
on their shoulders. We were then assigned groups for calculus class and
everyone clumsily shifted to the proper table. None of my group members had
large heads. I was relieved. The distraction would have been a greater obstacle
than the math—so I thought. It was quiet at the table and the feeling in the
room was apprehensiveness and awkwardness. The students at my table didn’t make
eye contact and the head snapped to attention when the professor felt enough
time passed and started to give a give us a speech.
“If you do your assigned homework, go
to SI, and come to class daily, I’m sure you will pass…”
“A reassuring way to introduce us,” one
of the younger students in my group whispered.
The
professor directed her attention at us and continued, “However, this class has a
high failure rate, so I suggest that you pay attention and follow the actions
of this table.”
She pointed at the table that was full
of the students with the largest heads. Without warning she started writing a
mad amount of equations on something in front of her that magically displayed
on the equations on the adjacent walls. Her writing was so sloppy and indiscernible
that after a few minutes of trying to copy and interpret, I just gave up. Thankfully
she stopped and had a foreign student hand out worksheets.
She then spoke in a condescending tone,
“Every single class you will exercise what I teach you with these worksheets.
They count for fifteen percent of your grade.”
I raised my hand and spoke before she
called on me. “How are we supposed to do these problems if you just showed us for
the very first time?”
“That is why you are in groups, and if
one of your group members can’t help you then, Rahul Banerjee, our mathematics
graduate student, will be happy to help you—in fact, Rahul, tell them your SI
hours.”
“Hilloe, yodu
cann see mey andy tidme bewtncentn fodrrr anda seex in Daneel foudrrr honddreedd.”
Class ended
with an unsuccessful attempt to finish the math problems. As we stood up, a
student with a huge head spoke.
“My father is fed
up with this school’s hidden antics. He’s an attorney and said that they’re intentionally
setting us up to fail, and that certainly is contradictory to what he is paying
for. A lawsuit is in order and is justified.” The boy directed this statement to
his group members and indirectly towards the professor, who come to find out, was
the chair of the mathematics department.
Another
student was about to chime in when the professor interrupted, “You are
repeating this class again because you didn’t take it seriously the last two times,
and you chose not to see the right people to help you succeed.”
“No
disrespect,” he rebutted, “But I did everything the curriculum suggested, including
SI. I still failed miserably. Are we cattle being herded through a dry pasture,
and only the fat ones make it to the other side?”
The groups
with the enlarged heads started lashing out uncontrollably and gnashed their
teeth violently.
They spoke in
unison, “It is time we stand up to them. It is time we stand up to them.”
“This is my
third time in this lousy class,” blurted another.
A warped headed fellow yelled, “Twice through
Calculus one and two, twice through physics one and two, and three times
through chemistry.”
“Me too,” the
one said with the fancy titanium support rods that barely held up his exercise
ball-sized as he nervously wiggled. “But now, I’m finally fattened up and can
make it through, huh? And so isn’t the university’s wallets! It should have
never come to this! Let’s do it! It’s time we stand up to them.”
He used his
hands to jerk his neck and dislodged his head from the support rods.
“Come on,
let’s do this.”
He
started rotating it in a circular motion. The rest of the students with the long
necks and grand heads did the same. They frantically bounced off of each other
as they advanced towards the professor. It didn’t take long before she was
getting knocked around and grotesquely disappeared into the group of banging
heads. I followed the madness as they made their way outside onto the campus sidewalks.
Every student with a brainy head joined into the mass and the havoc compounded.
Professors and staff were disappearing into the head-banging mob. The normal
students stood by and observed, but for some reason they didn’t react. They
somehow knew that these over-educated students, who one day could be them, were
finally using all that knowledge for something productive.
