The stupidest thing a student has ever said to me

I sat down and thought about what the stupidest thing a student ever said to me. It took a while to get there because students regularly say dumb things, particularly when they try to explain to me why I "need" to offer them a chance at "extra" credit. 

The problem is that there are different categories of stupid things. There's the mundane sin of not paying attention. Invariably, if I announce the due date of a paper or exam, invariably someone is going to ask me to repeat myself five times. This might seem to be stupidity, but it's actually stupidity's lay-about cousin, laziness.

I’m not going to class today because I honestly don’t know if I ever enrolled…

There’s stupidity about the subject matter. Now, I want to be clear: I do not hold my students responsible for knowing all of the subject matter right away; after all, that’s what my class is for: learning. I do hold my students responsible for knowing basic facts of the world that they need to be aware of in order to continue breathing.

Oh! It’s in and then out.

I’ve had my share of students who didn’t bring pens to exams, couldn’t figure out how to take notes during class, and didn’t realize that a room that’s numbered in the 200s would be on the second floor. I’ve had students who couldn’t find England on a map (it’s the fucking island!), and one time I had a student confuse Poland and Switzerland and then try to explain the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to me (don’t bother looking it up, just believe me when I say it’s stupid).

But after much consideration, and I think I found the winner: "I already knew all the stuff you said about the [Great] Depression. You need to come up with some new facts."

At first, this may not seem so stupid, but these few words say so much. Upon reading them, it became crystal clear to me that this student clearly didn’t understand A.) what an introductory survey class is for, and B.) how history works.

So, he already knew everything I had to say about the Depression. How utterly, utterly tragic. I had tried a new, novel, and exciting approach to the Depression, wherein I told my students what happened during the Depression and its effects on history. Of course I should have realized that little Frankie or Bobby or whoever-the-fuck already knew all about that, so I should have skipped it, leaving a Hitler shaped hole in WWII because cause and effect should be ignored when one kid in my class already knew the score.

To be honest, I have lost all goddam perspective on what anyone knows about history. I have spent ten years pursuing degrees in the subject and had an interest in it before going to college. The idea that my students have no fucking clue who Napoleon is, other than the fact that he was short (by the way, he was actually my height, a gentleman’s 5’ 9’’) is fucking horrifying beyond belief to me. Random student, you already know what happened in the goddamn Depression? Good! You get a goddamn gold star for not being a complete brain-dead moron. I’m still going to spend twenty minutes going over the relevant stories and statistics because there’s some drooling idiot, probably sitting in the back taking a nap under a damn baseball cap, the wearing of which in a classroom is the universal sign of disinterest in learning, who might not know, so shut the fuck up and let me teach so that someone doesn’t go into a voting booth thinking, “What’s so bad about a depression anyway? It’s just a bunch of lazy people who don’t want to work.”

If I could teach a class with the assumption that my students already know the basic material so that we can do something interesting, that’d be fan-fucking-tastic. But as it is, I’m a graduate student, which means I won’t do anything interesting until I finish my dissertation, so I’m stuck teaching the basics that people should already know from being alive during high school (and if your high school didn’t offer European history, you live in a backwards, fucking hick state and should have seen to your own education by reading a book at some point before deciding you wanted to go to college because you can’t blame your ignorance on the fact that you grew up in Kansas forever).

Having said all of that, I totally sympathize with this kid on the second account. That’s totally how I want history to work: when things are boring, I want to be able to come up with new facts. That’s the model Fox News works on if you replace boring with “liberal bias.”  The Depression, though one of the most important things in 20th century history, is both boring and, quite surprisingly, soul-crushingly sad. This kid doesn’t want to hear the same old things over and over about the Depression because he knows that stuff, and, presumably, is so jaded that he can’t be moved by the same old song and dance about how no one could afford bread and a third of everyone was unemployed. He wants to hear something new and novel about the Depression because that’s the only way he can muster up enough interest to listen to a lecture.

Being a nice guy, I’d like to help him out by offering some new [entirely true!*] facts about the Depression:

• So many longshoremen were laid off in New York that you could cross the Hudson River to New Jersey on their backs by starting a rumor that there was a ship coming into Newark that needed to be unloaded; one eminent historian has dubbed this phenomenon "the Hoover Bridge."
• The price of bread grew so dear in Manchester, that the only way people could afford it was by selling Irish into slavery; at its peak, bread cost three Irishmen a loaf, but you couldn’t get change for a half loaf.
• Between 1931 and 1937, unemployment for dragons was 98% (most expect it to be 100%, but there were Chinese women in racist cartoons who were called “The Dragon Lady” and found steady employment throughout that period).
• Japan did surprisingly well during the Depression, during which they spun record amounts of silk and sold it to spiders; as a result, unemployment among spiders skyrocketed, leading to mass spider suicides, mostly consisting of spiders crawling into people’s mouths while they slept.
• So many Parisians were starving during the Depression that the government briefly made it legal to hunt mimes. Parents who wanted to eat their children would force them to dress up in white face and striped shirts, saying it was “for the good of the nation.”

There you go, random student, new facts about the Depression! I hope that enriched your learning experience.