have i ever told y’all about the greatest moment of my academic career
i was a freshman in college and i had this history teacher who was ~edgy~ and his hotness level on ratemyprofessor was off the charts and he was the first teacher i ever heard use the word “fuck.” anyway he would do this thing every so often where we’d have a “quiz” and the first two questions were always really easy and the last one was hard – they were all similar questions, and the point was to show what you learn about history and what you don’t.
so one day he’s like okay kids time for a quiz and the first question was who killed abraham lincoln. the second question was who killed JFK. third question was who killed william mckinley.
we all take a few minutes and write down our answers, and then the teacher asks the questions again so we can shout out the answers. everybody answered the first two with really no problem.
now, keep in mind that this class was at 9 a.m. and i was exhausted All The Time during my freshman year of college so i sat in the back in my sweats and never said a word and the teacher definitely had no clue who i was.
so you can imagine his surprise when he asked the class who shot william mckinley and without missing a beat i said, “czolgosz,” pronounced correctly and everything.
my teacher froze and in a very stern voice asked, “what was that? what did someone just say?”
i repeated: czolgosz.
my teacher: “who said that?”
i raised my hand, and my super cool history teacher glared at me. he then asked me how the hell i knew the answer. he said that in the TWENTY YEARS he’d been teaching this stupid class, nobody, not A SINGLE PERSON, had ever known the answer to that question.
i then had to quietly explain to a room full of people that there’s a musical called assassins and there’s a song about czolgosz shooting william mckinley at the great pan american exposition in buffaloooooooo (in buffaloooooooo)
The arts are important.
I shocked a teacher once because I could recite the preamble to the US Constitution (got bonus points to), She asked why I’d taken it upon myself to memorize it. I had to explain it was in a School House Rock song….
I shocked church with my ‘math skills’ when they were asking how many seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, hours in a day, days in a year, now how about minutes in a year – and I call out five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes without pausing to think, cos Rent
Once aced a religion class pop quiz that asked me to list all of Jacob’s sons since they’re the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. The one and only time I’ve been thankful for Andrew Lloyd Webber. I even got points for getting the birth order correct.
me @ every self-righteous STEM major who derides the arts: art IS learning you fool! you baboon! you needlessly divisive motherfucker!!!
The Arts are important.
We don’t have STEM programs, now we have STEAM programs at my children’s schools.