And finally, here it is. #1. The stupidest thing a student has ever done. One so dumb even his classmates still talk about it.
The Mexicans.
I had a sophomore, let’s call him Dave. Dave was not the sharpest tool in the shed but was a decent kid. Didn’t do much work, talked too much, but never did anything wrong maliciously. When he got in trouble, it wasn’t the ‘I wish I was allowed to beat students’ kind of trouble. It was the ‘bang my head against the blackboard because no one can really be that dense’ kind of trouble.
Enter Ben Franklin.
Franklin, you see, was an anal son of a gun. He believed that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t accomplish, provided he had a plan. So Franklin spent most of his time making up plans and schedules and lists for how he was going to accomplish things (based on the number of plans and lists and whatnot, I’m amazed he had the time to become the great man he was). One such list detailed his plans for becoming “perfect”. He had thirteen virtues he believed a man needed in order to achieve perfection. And so he planned to work on these virtues, one at a time, until he had mastered each. A noble goal, I thought. Hell, even me – Mr. Anti Anal – can see the logic behind his plan.
So, I turned it into an assignment for the class. “Everyone take out a piece of paper,” I instructed. “What I want you to do is follow Franklin’s example. Choose a goal, something you want to become or achieve in your life. For example, Jack (he of the stapled nipple), you play football, right?” Jack nodded. “What position?”
“Third string bench warmer,” one of the other kids yelled out
“OK,” I said, taking the ball and running with it. “So, let’s say your goal is to become the first string bench warmer.” The class laughed. Jack seemed less than amused. I made a mental note to give him some alone time with the stapler to make up for it. “What I want you to do is come up with a list of thirteen things, thirteen steps you would need to follow to achieve that goal. Got it?”
“Our goal can be anything?” Dave asked.
A wise man (something I never claimed to be) would have known he was in trouble right then and there. “Sure,” I said. “As long as it isn’t something you’d get in trouble for. Your goal should not be to smoke the most pot of anyone in your graduating class”
You laugh – I had a senior who declared one of his three life goals was to smoke himself retarded. By unanimous vote, his class agreed that he already had.
So I left Dave and Jack and the rest of them to their work. I gave the last half an hour of class time to finish the assignment and hand it in. Once they had left, I collected them all in a pile and set to grading them.
Perhaps I should have been worried when I came upon this piece of brilliance, penned by Rod, one of Dave and Jack’s classmates:
“I want to someday crap the biggest tird known to man. So that someday my kids can tell their kids and then their kids about their grandpa who had the biggest tird ever.”His spelling, not mine. His punctuation, not mine.
His steps to achieving this goal included eating “mucho”
Taco Bell and “lots and lots” of cabbage.
And this
wasn’t the dumbest.
That honor was reserved for Dave. Dave’s goal was slightly ore ambitious. He wanted to own the best landscaping service in the Tri-State. It was his steps to reaching his goal that got him in trouble. Primarily, his first step: “Keep Costs down. Use cheap labor. Hire a bunch of Mexicans.”
Slamming Head Against Board Now, while what he said was (arguably) funny and (arguably) true, it also didn’t fit with the spirit and morals of our fine Catholic institution. And certainly wasn’t the kind of thing I could just smirk at and ignore. I had no choice but to give him a zero and a scolding note telling him that such “racist language was simply unacceptable in my classroom.” And that could’ve been the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
Dave, you see, was struggling to pass for the quarter. And he needed every grade he could get. So, he argued. His point wasn’t simply that what he had written wasn’t racist. No, he took a much different tact…
“It’s not racist!” he cried, in front of the entire class. “It’s true! I’ve got a landscaping magazine at home. And you think
I’m racist? There’s an ad in the back of the magazine. There’s a guy selling Mexicans in Arizona. Five for a hundred bucks!”
“Dave, you’re missing the point-”
“I’ll bring it in,” he said. “That guy is way worse than me.”
The idea that his “defense” was like comparing Stalin to Hitler didn’t phase him. And, true to his word, he did bring the magazine in. And waved it in my face over and over again. Until he realized one salient fact:
“Wait,” he said. “Did that grade count for this quarter or last?”
“Last,” I said. We were two weeks into the new quarter.
“Oh,” he said. “Never mind.”
And he sat down. And never mentioned it again.
And somewhere, some dude is selling five-for-a-hundred Mexicans. And Dave is socking away his money, following his step-by-step plan.
Ben Franklin must be so proud.
