Alright kids, sit down, buckle up, because I’ve got a story to tell!
So, I’m in college right? It’s this tiny private college in the middle of nowhere USA that you’ve probably never heard of. Anywho, so I have this class that is only on Tuesdays. The first “week” of the semester started on Wednesday, so I didn’t 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 I’m talking about is a creative writing class that really wouldn’t 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 haven’t had this class, which is one I’ve 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 isn’t hear, but it’s 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 we’ve missed an email saying it’s been cancelled. It hasn’t. We check that we have the right time. We do. Still, no professor. It’s 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 aren’t going to be leaving yet.
Still, there’s 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 what’s up, and he starts speaking.
“Alright, we need some controversy,” and we’re finally able to read what he wrote on the board:
Immediate agreement. I don’t 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, there’s no unity. Anywho, no one disagreed, so he erased that and began writing something else.
“Okay, that didn’t get the response I expected so…” 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 didn’t understand what a himbo was, so we wrote a list of basic characteristics:
3. Kind (which we elaborated as being someone who drinks their “respects women juice” 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)
Here’s 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 didn’t 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, “there’s only four of you today? How odd…” and we were like, “Uh, no, technically class is over.” 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 (He’s not a fan of The Scarlett Pimpernel), and basically whatever popped up in the conversation. Never give him a vampire book; he won’t read it. He’s not a huge fan of fantasy, because he feels like they’re all too British-lore centric and aren’t 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. He’s funny, and he used words like “woke” and he used them correctly. Guys, he called Limericks the Dad Jokes of poetry (affectionate) when all of us said we’ve 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 it’s 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 “ain’t” instead of “aren’t” and calls “aren’t” old school-teacher propaganda. I’m so excited you guys, this is going to be fantastic. :)