12
Cool Factor
Turn in the problem sets, please,” Bo said as the section ended.
One by one, the students passed the work forward.
Only two didn’t hand them in, which wasn’t bad.
Alvin had missed class, and no doubt he was still working on it, and Hattie glared at him sullenly, then looked away.
She waited until everyone left to approach him.
“I couldn’t do it.” Hattie sat in the empty chair next to his, and Bo stopped packing his things. A few of his students were talking in the hallway, and the door was ajar.
“Let’s hear it, Hattie. You okay?”
Hattie was a junior psych major, a Korean national who had gone to an international school in Seoul. She was normally a strong student, and Bo wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.
“I had a conflict with a professor about my grade.”
“Do you mean in our class? I’m the one who grades Psych 100A.”
“No, not this class,” she said, touching the back of her neck. Hattie wore a blue UCLA sweatshirt and sweatpants. No makeup, unwashed hair tied up in a ponytail. “I can’t tell you his name because you know him.”
“Is this about your midterms?”
“Yes. I went to speak to him. He was so rude. I think it’s because he got tenure last year.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Bo straightened his glasses and kept from folding his arms. Every time he had office hours, he thought about his body language as a future clinician. He leaned forward and paid careful attention. She was visibly upset. Hattie took her grades seriously.
“He can’t get fired now, so if I give him a bad eval it won’t even matter. It will be really hard for me to pull this up in my finals. I want to go to medical school, and I have to get all A’s.”
“No interest in getting a PhD?”
“No way.” She stared at him like he was crazy. “There’s no money in that. Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, laughing. “I mean, some people don’t care about money, right? You want to help people.”
“Yes,” he said, feeling a little embarrassed.
He had not disliked Hattie before, and he reminded himself that she was still a kid and didn’t know how to talk properly.
“Okay, so you want to be a medical doctor, and therefore you need good grades.” Bo knew premeds had to have exemplary transcripts.
His premed undergraduates were endlessly stressed out.
One from another section had killed himself a year before.
“B means I will be rejected from a top med school.”
“B should stand for ‘breathe,’ ” he said. “Also, I know plenty of students with B’s who got into med schools.”
Hattie looked him up and down. Bo wore an old white shirt that he had ironed himself last night and faded jeans. She stared at his cheap black sneakers he’d bought from a mart, which even DH had teased him about.
“What grade did you get? On that midterm?”
“B. Only a B-plus or an A-minus would be at all defensible,” she said, sounding like a lawyer.
Bo tried to keep his cool. He hated grading, and even worse, he hated arguing about grades.
“I see. What do you think you should do now?”
“I can’t fight him anymore. I couldn’t even sleep last night, I was so angry. I can’t stand the sight of him. He might ruin my chances of being a psychiatrist.”
“I don’t know if that’s true.”
“I can’t stand these tenured professors. They won’t move an inch.”
“I suppose the untenured faculty is more amenable,” he said, wondering what she must think of a graduate student like him.
Hattie blurted out, “I pay a lot of money to attend UCLA. I’m not in-state. I should get better treatment. His office hours are only an hour once a week.”
Hattie thought she was buying her education, like buying a lesson with a private tutor. From her appearances, she didn’t seem materialistic. But she was only twenty years old, and probably repeating ideas some adults had said to her.
“Hattie, you might get better outcomes if you focused on the learning. I realize you’re under a great deal of stress, and it’s obvious how hard you work, but thinking of your teachers as your employees is probably not the best idea.
A teacher might feel that you’re threatening him with a poor written evaluation.
You didn’t talk about the eval with your professor, did you? ”
Hattie caught herself and covered her mouth. “Oh, I didn’t mean to threaten him. I just think that these grades are important, and I need the best ones for medical school. He should want me to do well, right?”
“I’m sure he does,” Bo said. “But everyone is human, and it would be hurtful to think that your students don’t respect you.”
“I don’t think he wants me to do well, or anyone for that matter.
I think he just wants to prove how smart he is.
He’s intellectually insecure. The curve in that class is crazy.
Only people who are stupid insist on these rigid grading curves.
Why can’t everyone get an A if they deserve it?
In this class, no one might get an A, and now it’s too late for me to withdraw. ”
Hattie appeared so disheartened that though Bo disagreed with her, he didn’t want to say anything more.
“Do you have any other B’s?”
Hattie got up from her seat, refusing to answer.
“I’ll hand in my problem set by the end of the day. I’m sorry I’m late.” She bowed reflexively, then left. “My friends are waiting for me.”
Bo was still reliving that conversation in his head, muttering to himself, as he unlocked his car door in the campus parking lot.
“You look happy,” Priscilla Banks said, laughing. “Not.” She was putting her backpack into the trunk of her dusty Nissan.
Bo smiled. They’d gotten to know each other a little during Dr. Wilson’s class at Fullerton. She was a year behind him at UCLA, and on the developmental psych track. It was nice to have a friendly face from his Fullerton days at UCLA.
Priscilla was tall and eye-catching. Once an actor, she understood her own presence.
In Franz Hall, she stood out because she wore her clothes well and looked more like a well-off humanities grad student than a poor one from social sciences.
No one could identify her race or ethnicity exactly, and she seemed to enjoy the guessing.
Her skin was medium brown, her long brown hair wavy and usually kept back with a colorful scarf.
Today it was shamrock green, which lit up the pale blue green in her eyes.
She spoke Spanish well, but wasn’t a native speaker, she said.
“You okay?” she asked him.
“I’m fine,” he said, settling behind the wheel. “Have a good weekend.” He closed the door and turned the key, but the engine wouldn’t start. Bo jumped out of the car and waved at Priscilla, who was getting in her car.
“Battery?” she said.
“Yes. Help.”
“I can give you a jump,” she said calmly.
As they connected the cars, his student Hattie and her friends walked by, staring at the two old cars. Bo drove an eleven-year-old gray Subaru, and Priscilla’s car looked far worse. The girls laughed and shook their heads.
“What a day,” he said.
“Are they laughing at us?” Priscilla stared back at them. Their tittering ceased as they walked away.
“I hate that girl,” Priscilla said.
“What? Why?” Bo was surprised to hear this. Priscilla was usually more upbeat.
“You swear not to tell?”
“Swear.”
“Blood oath?”
“Okay. Is there actual blood involved? Or do you mean it metaphorically?”
“Shut up, Fullerton,” she said.
Bo laughed.
“That kid Hattie Cho. Can’t staaaaand her. Fought with me for every fucking grade. I ended up giving her an A-minus just so she couldn’t dispute it.”
“What did she deserve?”
“B-plus at best. At best,” Priscilla said. “She’s just another grade-grubbing Asian kid.”
“Watch it, Young Fullerton,” he said. “No racism.”
Priscilla laughed.
“You know what I mean. She looks dorky and doesn’t put on airs, but that kid is rich and thinks we’re pieces of shit who work for her.”
“Oh.” Bo exhaled. “Yes. I think you are correct in your estimation.”
“Wait, is she in your class? I should shut the fuck up.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, Hattie is one of my students. That is all I will say.”
“I will make a terrible therapist,” she said.
“The kid is premed. She’s just freaking out. She doesn’t mean anything.”
“I have White kids, Latino kids, and Black kids who are also grade grubbers,” Priscilla said. “I shouldn’t have said it like that about her being Asian. Sorry.”
“You shouldn’t have,” he said. “Demerit.” Bo smiled.
“I was a grade grubber. How else did I transfer here, then also get into the fucking UCLA psych program?” Priscilla laughed again, and Bo thought she looked beautiful standing in the sunny parking lot, the tall palm trees swaying behind her. “Okay, Fullerton, I have some blood tickets.”
“What?”
“I gave blood this morning. They give you movie tickets. I’m a broke grad student who needs to go to the movies. Come with me? My roommate just bailed, and there’s a showing in an hour for Sideways. It came out a while ago, but I heard it’s really good.”
Bo hadn’t gone to the movies in years; it always felt like an indulgence of time and money he couldn’t afford. Now he wanted nothing more than to go with her.
“Okay. I just have to text my sister. I need to be at my job in Irvine by seven. If you give me the ticket, I can buy popcorn, then, right after, I have to push this car and make it to Irvine.”
“You live in Irvine?”
“No. I live here. Weyburn.” Bo pointed in the direction of his rental.
“Fancy.” Priscilla pretended to remove a hat and bowed dramatically.
“It’s a studio, and it costs too much, but I walk to classes or use my bicycle. I only keep this car going because I tutor on the weekends and go home on Friday nights. I should find a cheaper place off campus and get roommates, but I’m too old for that. Anyway,” he said, and took out his phone.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I turn thirty in February.”
“You look younger,” she said, and she waited for him to text Mido that he’d be late.