Mr. & Mr. Smartypants

So I am in summer school right now, and normally this isn't a big deal, but this class (Research Methods for Behavioral Sciences) for some reason just overwhelms me. That reason is called Mr. & Mr. Smartypants. There's 2 guys in my class that just bug me SO bad. Normally I can deal with almost everyone I encounter, most the time I even like them, but these two guys make me constantly practice the art of biting my tongue. There are so many times I've wanted to say "keep your insane terminology and your overacheiving antics to yourself!" I'll explain. They are smart. Not just smart, but UBERsmart, too smart for their own coolness smart. The type of smart that no matter how right you are you'll lose an argument with them because they know better words than you. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking on intelligence, book smarts, street smarts, or any other kind of smarts. I happen to think I'm pretty smart most of the time and I'm ok with that. But these guys really bother me.

I think the real reasons I'm annoyed are:

a) they are smarter than me,

b) this class makes my head hurt,

c)they are REALLY alot smarter than me,

d) I'm frustrated that this class is so hard, becuase I don't like feeling stupid.

Back to the story, they constantly take the class discussions to a level that leaves the rest of us cleaning up our brain explosions.

For example:

Last night in class we were discussing our next assignment which is a research proposal, where we state what our research project will be, and how we're going to collect our info and prove our position, and also every other aspect of our projects. Well Mr. Smartypants 1 goes "Hey Professor, how did you like my article review?" (article review = our last assignment, a summary of a medical, psychiatric, or some other kind of journal article that explained a recent study performed and it's outcome, like mine was 'Does obesity cause depression?') He then proceeds to say, it was kind of long, but 17 pages should be a sufficient article review. HE IS NUTS!!! MINE WAS 4 PAGES! (Mr. Smartypants 1 would probably be unpleasantly surprised to find out my score was 8 points higher than his on that assignment... yeah yeah I eavesdropped, I'm not sorry!)

So the teacher just kind of laughs an annoyed laugh because I'm sure he loves when he gets these arrogant overachievers who think they know more than the teacher in his class. So after a while our teacher starts discussing our projects. Mr. Smartypants 2 says to Mr. Smarty 1 "Hey you planned your project yet?", #1 says "oh yeah, and I created this survey that I'm going to allow other people to use in the future for their research because I know it will be better than what's out there already. I don't need to use surveys created by other people, I spent 9 hours yesterday designing this survey to collect statistics for an idiographic, longitudinal study that will find the nomothetic, or qualitative attributes to the respondents." (I may have added a few words from class last night... I was a bit overwhelmed by the terminology I was having to learn.)

Then #1 and #2 proceed to interrupt the class lecture every few minutes with questions like "now from and operationlist point of view is that the correct criterion for a longitudinal or a cross-sectional study?" or "qualitative vs quantitative, do you believe the correlation will be effective in conceptualism?" and I'm sitting in the chair across from them thinking, "hmmm... my cuticals are dry, I really wish I could figure out where I put my lotion."

At the end of class we discussed our research proposal topics... I decided to see if having friends at school effects a high school student's GPA... I'm sure Mr. and Mr. Smartypants decided to study something outrageous like whether the chaos theory can be proven if you juxtapose it with superheroes from comic books and stories from history OR whether global warming effects our dental hygiene.

***I can't be held responsible if someone actually knows the terminology I mentioned above and says I don't make sense...None of the quotes above were direct quotes. I just slapped together the terminology that sent my brain into shock last night. haha!