This is in the same vein as a former post. Before it gets underway, I should clarify that while it may seem this course is of no relevance to my major, it is one of four courses I can choose from to satisfy the three engineering science elective degree requirements.

My fluid mechanics prof is from argentina. You would think he were caucasian until he opens his mouth and speaks with a strong argentinian accent. He is better, though, with English, than the oriental substitute from last semester whom I allude, in the first sentence of this post, to having written about.

The fluid mechanics prof is an animated and humorous fellow. He has confessed to having had mental problems in the past. Among the things he discussed during the first class were some disparities between American and Argentinean culture. He said he has a habit of pointing at students when asking them a question during lecture, but has been briefed by the department that such action could be interpreted as being rude and so he’ll try to overcome his habit by reaching for a dry erase marker, or something else, when posing questions. He also told us that in Argentina there’s an expression to the effect of “I’ll kill the students with this exam”, meaning the exam is tough, but that this in no way should be interpreted to mean that he literally intends to kill us either physically or mentally. Once, when writing formulas too quickly on an overhead projector slide, the letter g, representing acceleration due to gravity, was distorted and inscrutable, and he called it a fast g, and proceeded to slowly and carefully draw a normal g.

But it is what happened today which motivated me to write this post at all. He called upon a student to answer a question he had posed. The student, as most of us would be, since the lectures are nothing special, was caught off guard and needed a moment to collect his thoughts. The prof took this opportunity to bring attention to the student’s apparent lack of focus by asking “Were you counting black sheep or white sheep?”. This is an example of something I would like to someday master. The fact that the question was not “Were you counting sheep?” but was instead one step further is representative of a socialization tactic that grants the person who uses it a degree of control over the people addressed. It’s a bit like chess, except that when you make a really good move, analogous to using this tactic in conversation, you can move again before your opponent, while they take a moment to digest what was just uttered, giving you even more time to play your next move. The metaphor breaks down when you recognize that more often than not, the people you’re talking with are not considered opponents, but the value of saying things which build on unspoken assumptions remains.