Actually, he asked “Who here has not heard of a fermionic?” and out of sheer … I dunno, disrespect? indignance?, I raised my hand really high, and there was a smattering of hands across the room too. Just to see what he’d say. And we were rewarded with something about the new illiteracy of America and how it is impossible and dismaying that so many of us don’t know this stuff becuase it’s all over popular science and magazines and the news and I wanted to laugh but I didn’t. And then he talked about how he was only trying to lighten up the class because he could see that “some of you look really stung by that test.”