Midterm day in the batsoid seminar

pivotal · 7 Nov YDAU, Saturday class

• When: 7 Nov YDAU, the Saturday prorector-class period (the WETA closed-circuit broadcast slot, Tues/Sat ~1435-1445h, runs during it).
• What: Her seminar sits its midterm, and the whole pedagogic register is on the page. Prorector classes are Academy jokes, "fascinating the way plane-crash footage is fascinating," and hers is the exemplary case: the perennially batsoid "The Personal Is the Political Is the Psychopathological: the Politics of Contemporary Psychopathological Double-Binds," which Ted Schacht has taken all three times it's been offered despite the closed-room vitamin-B stink he can just barely stand — last spring's section, "The Toothless Predator: Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault," having been one of the most disorientingly fascinating experiences of his intellectual life so far, outside the dentist's chair. The exam's Item 1 sets a pathological kleptomaniac who is also a pathological agoraphobe ("you must go out, into the marketplace to satisfy your overwhelming compulsion to steal, steal, steal," but "you cannot under any circumstances, leave home") and asks what you do, under the standing instruction KEEP YOUR ANSWERS BRIEF AND GENDER NEUTRAL. Her exams are notorious no-brainers, and Schacht sketches prenatal dentition-charts in his exam's margins, "not wanting to embarrass Thode by handing the no-brainer exam in too soon."