Would You Like Some Coffee with Your Sweet'N Low?

Every Summer B, I teach two classes for a program designed to give first-generation minority students a head start when classes begin in the fall. I love working for this program because of the homogeneity of the students. Community colleges attract everyone from dual-enrollment high schoolers to seventy-year-old life-long learners. The students in my Summer B courses, however, are all cocky seventeen-year-olds who believe their recent high school graduation makes them incredibly sophisticated.

Observing these students is great fun because so many of their experiences are brand new. Most of them are sexually active; some of them have the babies to prove it. Many of them have already begun their experimentation with drugs, alcohol, and outrageous interest rates on credit cards. But they still have so much to learn!

Take, for instance, Genelle. I had booked a computer classroom in the Learning Resource Center (our fancy way of saying library). The provost built a cafe on the first floor, and in the spirit of Borders or Barnes & Noble, students can have drinks with them anywhere in the building, even the classrooms full of expensive technology. Genelle had purchased a large coffee to bring to class and grabbed a handful of Sweet'N Low packets for flavor. Seventeen packets, at least. Maybe the cafe was so busy that no one had stocked the regular sugar and Genelle just didn't realize there was a difference. Maybe she was concerned about her weight and making different food choices. Since these students consume sugar in all forms—chugging Red Bull and Pepsi, running to the bookstore during break for Zingers and M&Ms, bringing Ziplock bags full of Twix and Froot Loops—seventeen packets of real sugar would not have surprised me.

What became obvious, though, was that Genelle had never used Sweet'N Low in her short life, for I watched her tear open one pink packet at a time, dump it into the coffee, and stir before she reached for another. It never occurred her to taste the coffee between packets. She has probably never heard that salting an entree before taking a first bite is one way to signal to a corporate boss that an employee doesn't make smart decisions. I was too dumbfounded to yell, "Genelle, for the love of god, stop!"

Genelle swept all of the empty packets into her palm and threw them in the trash can. I started class; she blew on the coffee to cool it. Everyone knew when Genelle took the first sip because her "Gah!" startled us all. Luckily for her computer, she sloshed coffee on her jeans instead of the keyboard.

I don't remember when I learned that artificial sweetener packed more of a punch than real sugar. I do know that I would carefully taste anything new I encountered now. It's a shame, really, that I have outgrown all of those "sweet" surprises that youth still get to enjoy!