Educational Babysitting

I have never seen Dr. Bettina Pedersen as attentive to a single group in class as she was today. We were sectioned off into five groups in class today to discuss Thomas Hardy's rather pessimistic poem about the struggles of life, "Hap." Our group, self-titled the "Team of #1's" by our ever-so-brilliant scribe, Josh, moved beyond prosody to themes when we decided that the speaker must have been a postal worker if he hated his life that much. From there we had a, rather intelligent if I may say so, conversation about the linguistic origins of the qualifier--postal--as in someone going "postal" and decided that some postal worker must have gone crazy or something.

Anyway. We were having too much of a literary blast during discussion time. Bettina kept moving across the room and then returning to position herself right next to our group as if to remind us to keep it down. Can we help it if educational experience is also entertaining. For more details, see Jordan Frye who was singled out more than once, at which point we all could do nothing but laugh. He made me laugh so hard once that I cried and couldn't stop for a couple minutes!