Feeling extreme sympathy for the poor bastard, students confirmed Monday that Professor Charles Kuhn, lecturer IV for Psychology 111, began an 8 AM class by feigning a happy, near whimsical greeting to begin his PowerPoint presentation.
“Good Monday morning class! I assume you all did the Pinker reading?” said Kuhn as he forced a smile and clapped his hands together. When faced with silence, he recovered by quickly rearranging his notes and hitting the keyboard to the “Any questions from last lecture?” slide.
“I feel kinda bad for him, if anything,” LSA freshman Christine Pritchard said, after attending his lecture. “His fake enthusiasm did nothing to compensate for his clearly miserable life.”
The pathetic wretch reportedly spoke with little confidence and with an ever-so-slight hint of a whine in his voice. When his clearly rehearsed lecture was interrupted by students’ questions, he was visibly thrown off.
“Perhaps his mind was in a different place, maybe with his evident problems within the department, or problems in his personal life,” sophomore Nguyet Le said. “Either way, I’m just glad he made it through his lecture without too many awkward pauses and ruffling through his printouts.”
Throughout the lecture, the outright coward maintained his “fun professor” persona to the best of his limited abilities, at one point pulling up a YouTube video that he thought would get a good crowd reaction and was somewhat tangentially related to psychology.
“Although clips from British game shows have quite a tenuous connection to Erikson’s stage theory of development, I feel like it really went over well with our class,” Pritchard explained. “We’ll take whatever we can get from that poor little fucker on stage up there.”
The most telling sign that the forlorn schmuck’s life is complete shit and that he’s barely hanging on for many students was how he struggled at improvising dialogue to let the class out ten minutes early.
According to reports, the troubled lecturer got to his last slide sooner than expected, paused, forced laughter, and then stated, “I guess you all have ten minutes of your time for your own time, outside of this class time.”
“That was definitely the clearest sign that something was definitely going on in his personal life,” section 007 GSI David Simmons said in an email. “I don’t know whether he’s frustrated sexually, or with his job, or what, but it’s clear that in many ways he has just given up trying.”
At press time, the inconsolable patsy was unavailable for comment.
Originally published Feb. 2014
