Alright kids, sit down, buckle up, because Iāve got a story to tell!
So, Iām in college right? Itās this tiny private college in the middle of nowhere USA that youāve probably never heard of. Anywho, so I have this class that is only on Tuesdays. The first āweekā of the semester started on Wednesday, so I didnāt go to that class at all that week. The next week, Tuesday ended up being a snow day, so all our classes for that day were on zoom. The class Iām talking about is a creative writing class that really wouldnāt work over zoom, so we got an email saying that class was cancelled for that week as well. So the first two weeks of the semester and I still havenāt had this class, which is one Iāve really been looking forward to, both because I enjoy creative writing, and because of who the professor is. Needless to say, this third week comes around and it looks like nothing is going to get in the way of me going to this class, and I am super excited. The anticipation has been building up and I am ready to finally get to this class.
3:30 PM comes around and all of us are restless. The professor still isnāt hear, but itās not unheard of for one to be a few minutes late. The clock keeps ticking by, and still no professor. Some of us check if weāve missed an email saying itās been cancelled. It hasnāt. We check that we have the right time. We do. Still, no professor. Itās been long enough that any other group of students probably would just up and leave, but we have all been looking forward to this class since we saw that we got it on our schedules, and we arenāt going to be leaving yet.
Still, thereās only so long you can wait before you start to get bored and restless. One of my classmates gets up and starts writing on the whiteboard. We all glance up from our various conversations to see whatās up, and he starts speaking.
āAlright, we need some controversy,ā and weāre finally able to read what he wrote on the board:
Immediate agreement. I donāt think anyone disagreed, even us Harry Potter nerds, because lets face it, Hogwarts is a bad school. It breeds hatred and prejudice. The house system is bs, the year-long competition unnecessary and super stressful, thereās no unity. Anywho, no one disagreed, so he erased that and began writing something else.
āOkay, that didnāt get the response I expected soā¦ā On the board it now said:
Thus began the most bizarre class I have ever experienced in all my two semesters of college and schooling in general. Some people didnāt understand what a himbo was, so we wrote a list of basic characteristics:
3. Kind (which we elaborated as being someone who drinks their ārespects women juiceā or is a feminist)
This classmate then proceeded to go down a list of controversial himbos for us to decide whether they actually were one or not (we decided that anything that would take Kronk off the list was invalid)
Hereās a picture of our list:
This took at the very least a half hour of conversation. We only stopped because people had some places to be, mainly the guy who stood up and started the conversation in the first place.
Guys, I am now far more comfortable with these classmates and know them far better than some of the classmates that I have gone to school with since elementary.
Anywho, like I said, most people left after that first guy left. There was maybe about 10 minutes left of the class, technically (it ends at 4:45), and there were only four of us who opted to stay. I had another class at 7:30 and had nothing better to do until then, the other three had similar reasons. I made an off-handed comment about how it would be funny if the professor showed up the last 5 minutes of class; the others chuckled in that sort of way that meant they agreed that it would be funny if that did happen, but they didnāt really believe it would.
And you know what happened? You know what happened? He DID! Five minutes left and in walks Professor Orson Scott Card with a bag full of books and no care in the world.
It turns out that he had been told from our registrar office that the class started at 5 and he never bothered to double check, because why would they lie to him? He thought he was early. He was so proud of that until he thought the class was supposed to start and he was like, āthereās only four of you today? How oddā¦ā and we were like, āUh, no, technically class is over.ā He was so embarrassed. We all felt so bad for him. We stayed for the next hour and a half listening to him ramble about poetry, the importance of research when writing historical fiction (Heās not a fan of The Scarlett Pimpernel), and basically whatever popped up in the conversation. Never give him a vampire book; he wonāt read it. Heās not a huge fan of fantasy, because he feels like theyāre all too British-lore centric and arenāt applying our modern experiences enough (he said it better but that was kind of the gist). He has a semi-morbid sense of humor.
It was fantastic. Heās funny, and he used words like āwokeā and he used them correctly. Guys, he called Limericks the Dad Jokes of poetry (affectionate) when all of us said weāve never written one before and he highly recommend we try to. He bashed critics. He talked about his kids and grandkids. He offered to read our poetry outside of class assignments and give peer feedback because he loves poetry and itās his opinion that having a peer read your poetry is akin to giving them something to appreciate, not criticize. He thinks it makes much more sense to say āainātā instead of āarenātā and calls āarenātā old school-teacher propaganda. Iām so excited you guys, this is going to be fantastic. :)