Blanket Hog

I read the course evaluations my students wrote just now. I was expecting them to be filled with "You're such a cunt," and other similar epithets, since one girl just before writing her evaluation of me as a teacher and the Research Paper Class in general asked, "What happens if a teacher gets a bad evaluation from everyone in class." To which I replied something along the lines of "Jackshit." They were all pretty upset since I had just minutes before handed back their graded research papers, most of which received pretty low grades. So, much to my surprise, the evaluations were all pretty positive, and one claimed that my class was that student's favorite of the semester. This is very confusing to me since most students stared at me slack-jawed-like the whole semester.

Yesterday, my mom and I got back in town from Wisconsin and called in an order to a local restaurant for some deep dish pizza. My mom was going to pay in cash, so she asked me what the price was a little while after I called. I didn't think to remember the exact total, so I said "I think he said $16 something." We were in my apartment and she was fixing my lamp when the delivery guy knocked on my door. My mom told me she had put left a $20 bill on the table. The pizza guy quoted $13 something as a price. So I looked over at my mom to see what kind of tip she wanted to leave and she told him to keep the change. So I thought something along the lines of, "That's a pretty big tip, perhaps she's feeling generous," and then thought nothing more of it as my mind was consumed by the sight/smell/taste of the best kind of pizza mankind has ever seen/smelt/tasted. This morning, she left a message for me complaining of how she was ripped off. Apparently, she heard the delivery guy say that it was $16 something. And, she even thought, I don't know if I want to give him a tip of $3 and change. I told her that the delivery guy told her the right price but she is convinced that he scammed her. So, she would rather believe that she was malevolently swindled than that she willingly spent more money that she intended. Now, there have been occasions when I have tipped someone and then later realized that I had given more than I had anticipated, but I usually shrug it off and think "Well, that person is happy because of the big tip." Perhaps having been on the receiving end of tips encourages me to have a more laid-back attitude about such things. I'm just amused by my mom's outraged conviction.