Faculty Meetings Scoop

The Humor Page was “granted” special access to a Faculty Meeting when a “generous” student used their non sibi attitude to deliver cups of overly sugared D-Squared coffee and a smuggled hidden camera (or three) to the teachers. The following is a study on the faculty members in their native habitats when not preoccupied by their student prey. When you enter the Elting Room of Phillips Hall during the Faculty Meetings period late on a Monday morning, to your left, you will find the English department sprawled by the back tables next to the patio. Their mountain bikes are either parked outside of the building or perched on their cars after a weekend of fun and ruggedness in the woods with their equally outdoorsy spouses and families. They sit together coolly as they discuss the latest Booker Prize winning author, their steaming mugs of eccentric coffee (from D-Squared, of course) as black as the faded leather cover of their Moleskine notebooks.Next to the Bread Loaf bunch sit the Harkness Warriors of the faculty world: the modern languages department. They cluster front and center, more than a handful of languages flying around as arguments are made and presented to the disaffected deans and administrators. You can always count on a teacher of the modern languages department to voice an opinion in faculty meetings; they’re the types of people to read the terms and conditions and write angry letters to Apple when they find a loophole in the contract.In complete contrast to the modern languages, the classics department is what some might call the “Harkness Ninja.” They sit in the back right corner, next to the math department, and chuckle to one another as they slip notes between them, the ancient Latin and Greek jokes getting more and more complex as the tirade of a modern language teacher goes on for another endless minute. The teachers of the classics department, all five of them, sit in tweed blazers and funky ties that their kids picked out, thinking of how many sight tests they can spring on their students before another one drops the language.The administrative team rules over their faculty kingdom in the front of the room. They all sit gracefully in the big, wooden chairs, looking pensive and unimpressed most of the time, while an occasional smile graces a dean’s face, encouraging whichever teacher is complaining about the girls’ dress code (or rather, lack thereof). The administration is like the Plastics, but they are able to control their tables not with iron fists, but with soft, yet stern, ones.In between the classics department and the rulers of the room sits the trail mix blend of the math department. In varying long, flower pattern skirts and monochromatic shirt/tie combinations, they huddle around, serious and focused on the matter at hand. The math teachers have mastered the art of grading tests and still appearing engaged, so when one of them expresses a frown, one can’t normally tell if it indicates disapproval of the topic at hand, or in the acceptance of their students’ failing test grades.Dispersed among the various groups of the room, the unattached members of the science department sit alone. There are always a few fruit flies lazily circling the heads of biology teachers, and the chemistry teachers walk in with charred-off shirt sleeves and carrying the smell Eau de Periodic Table of Elements.Uninterested in the mundane surroundings in front of them, the teachers of the other departments straggle in a few minutes late into the period, and spend the rest of their time deciding the intellectual worth of every other subject based on their Candy Crush score.