In which I am forced to remain silent.

I have laryngitis, I can't make a sound, and I have four lectures to give this week. Well, three more. One of my TAs took my stats lecture for me this morning. He did a great job, under the circumstances. Delivering someone else's lecture using someone else's overheads is never easy.

My TA is very knowledgeable, knows this material like the back of his hand, and even managed to throw some jokes into the lecture that I hadn't heard before. However, he is Chinese, and his English is heavily accented. So one yahoo in the class (I love living in a red state), rather than asking him to go back to a slide he went through rather quickly, belittled him by snidely commenting, "This isn't a race, you know." Even though I was right there, in the front of the class with my TA, he still felt justified in making this sort of a remark, just because the TA wasn't Anglo.

I wanted to pick him up by the straps of his overalls and throw him all the way to China, where, with any luck, he would have landed in front of a classroom full of Chinese college students who expected him to deliver a physics lecture. In Chinese. But of course, this character doesn't know any physics, and he looked like he weighed around 250 lbs., so the best I could have done was give him a good wedgy.