(note to those who know me: what follows is fiction)
Have you ever been happily doing your thing when someone of superior abilities or rank came along? Imagine singing a song only to find that the artist who recorded that song is listening. Imagine demonstrating a cooking technique only to see Julia Child walk into the kitchen. So you may imagine how I felt giving a lecture on ecology to a desultory freshman class when I looked up to see a star of the field sitting in the back row. Up to that point I had been giving the lecture, but thinking about the mixed motives of the students who sat before me. A few of them were indeed fascinated by the intricacies of the changing abiotic factors in the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest, but most were only partially present. My own mind was only half on the lecture I was giving. The rest of it was busy categorizing and judging the students in front of me: that one was only interested in getting good enough grade to get into medical school, this one just wanted the credit, this other one was probably only in college because he couldn’t think of anything better to do, this one over there thought this was all just a continuation of high school. I was just considering putting aside these harsh and uncharitable thoughts and replacing them with my usual benefit of the doubt attitude when I noticed my former professor listening to the lecture. He was my hero. I had learned the entire subject matter sitting reverently at his feet. Many of the phrases I used came directly from his lectures. I felt acutely embarrassed lecturing in his presence. Awkwardly, I welcomed him to the class and asked if he would like to speak on the subject at hand. “No, no, you have prepared and I have not,” he said, so I carried on as best I could. My mouth was dry and my pace quickened enough that I completed the entire lecture with ten minutes to spare, rather like the gait of a woman walking alone on a dark city street unsure if the person behind her posed a danger. When I gathered up my papers and erased the board, my professor had vanished, but that afternoon I ran into him in the coffee shop. He sat down at the table where I was drinking tea and texting my daughter instructions for getting dinner ready. “Great lecture,” he said. I told him he was too kind and our talk turned to family updates. He was apparently in town to see a niece get married, but thought he would visit an old colleague and had recognized my voice as he walked down the corridor. He apologized profusely for barging in. I told him he was welcome anytime, but didn’t think he would get much information from my lectures! “On the contrary,” he said, “I learned a lot from it.” I wondered if he meant that he had learned more about the infinite ways communications can be mistranslated in another person’s mind, but I was too shy to ask what on earth he might have learned. I just hoped he hadn’t somehow intuited my uncharitable thoughts. Our conversation was interrupted by none other than the college president, who laid a hand on his shoulder but spoke to me, “I see you have met one of my favorite students. I am quite pleased with how well he has done.”
