Teaching Assistant Jeremy Walter could have sworn his discussion section had more students the week before.

“I felt like last Thursday, the kids were fighting over the front row,” said Walter. “Now there’s only one row. Did I hallucinate all those other students?”

Walter reasons with himself that perhaps he was more focused on his “killer slides” last week than on the crowd of students, and so his perception of the room may be distorted.

“I was showing some videos I made in my days as a General Chemistry 151 student,” recalled Walter with an eerie fondness. “And the room was dark while my periodic table rap remix played so it may have seemed like there were more kids than there were.” Walter also explained that they ran out of time to play his “Bonding with Chemical Bonding” icebreaker so he still doesn’t know the names and faces of all his students.

“There was a lot of commotion at the end of class when I announced we wouldn’t have time for the game until next week,” said Walter. “But maybe that was just the kids packing up to leave,” considered Walter.

“I also felt like the email list was larger than the amount of kids who arrived this week, and when I shared the link to my Youtube channel, the views on my rap skyrocketed,” said Walter. “Maybe this week was just a little more barren because of the Freshman Plague?”

It appeared his question was answered when Walter received a Facebook notification during the interview that read “’My Weird-Ass Chemistry TA’ has tagged you in a video.”