It's Academic

Hello. This is the increasingly internationally famous Sunday Gene Pool — presented today on Saturday just to be contrarian — in which I beg you to submit personal stories for later discussion, but promise to entertain you in return. First, a timely Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Today’s question ensues — it’s about your experiences with academia — but first, three pertinent personal stories.

First academic story:

When I was in junior high school — it’s called middle school today, even in NYC — the science teacher was the gym teacher. The thing is, he was a gym teacher primarily, but staffing was haphazard and for a few years he filled in for the vacant science teacher’s position. Let me just stipulate that he was a very good gym teacher. He once gave the science class an impromptu quiz, for extra credit. One question was “Why does the stomach grumble when you are hungry?”

There were four choices, none perfect; I selected the best of them. The teacher later announced that the correct answer is that “the walls of the empty stomach are grinding together.” I timidly raised my hand and said I didn’t think that was right, that it was actually about secretion of goo that made the stomach and intestines flinch and wiggle as though they were processing food, and that we were hearing the liquids swishing and the muscles twitching, and he found this to be a hilariously naive explanation and spent five minutes genially talking about how you need percussion and friction to make audible noises, and how teachers, and not students, impart wisdom and truth. I didn’t get the extra credit but the imbeciles who thought the stomach sandblasted itself, did.

Second academic story:

I once got a B on a short paper about Thoreau. I went to the teacher to complain that it should have been an A, and she said, “You spelled it Thorough all the way through.” I sat right back down again.

Third academic story:

I took honors English in 11th grade. The teacher was good. It’s funny what you remember: He had an Italian-sounding surname but was devoutly Jewish. One day, for an assignment, I submitted an essay on a subject I wish I could remember. He returned it with a tepid grade. He believed in one-on-one conversations, and in mine he told me I was a smart guy but that I should look for a career other than writing. He said I wasn’t quite cut out for it. He was being harsh, but not, I think, mean. He was trying to help a kid make life decisions.

At the time I planned to be a doctor, so the guy wasn’t delivering devastating news. I don’t remember being angry. I do remember feeling challenged, and insulted, a little, and feeling misjudged (“dissed” would not be invented for another decade.) A couple of more years passed, and then, in college, on my first day, I walked into the NYU daily newspaper office, and, in a sense, never came out. I’m still there.

More years went by. I got a newspaper job, and then another one, and another, and eventually became the editor of Tropic, the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine. Together with Tom Shroder and Dave Barry and Madeleine Blais and Joel Achenbach and John Dorschner and sometimes Carl Hiaasen, we turned it into the best and most rewarded newspaper magazine in the country. Over the next five years, this tiny niche publication won two Pulitzer prizes and was a finalist for a third.

We were kind of famous. Big-name journalists sometimes wrote for us — Calvin Trillin once had a cover story. Toward the end of my tenure there, a story came in over the transom, unsolicited, from an older man in the Bronx. It was my high-school English teacher. It was about some complex issue in Judaica — apparently, that was all he had been writing about for years. It was not poorly written but was hardly compelling. I remember crying just a little bit before I rejected it. I smiled at the irony, but there was no real elation.

Your challenge for Tuesday: Amusing and/or compelling stories from your education; they might include incidents where teachers didn’t come off looking so smart, or you might have been the butt of the joke. You can range far afield, so long as it is funny and / or compelling. Send ‘em HERE.

… or here, to this nice orange button. It goes to the same place:

Also, I am still taking reactions to this disturbing story, which I hope to address on Tuesday. Was the woman unwise, and if so, how unwise, and how — if at all — should we consider it in context of the whole matter? Send your stuff to this same orange button.

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