33 things a real professor said in lectures

This is all I’ll say: the person who said these things is a brilliant professor, wonderful mentor, and I will miss him dearly now that I’m graduated. I served as a teaching assistant for him for an introductory course that I took three years earlier. The following are the only notes I took in the class.

1.      Friendship is magic. What, are none of you bronies?

2.      I hate Paris-ites (referring to Paris Hilton fans)

3.      I think Alexander Pope would be the king of the pending-facebook-friend-request.

4.      I’m most interested in stories of the seedy underbelly of places.

5.      Reading Seasons makes me ask questions like: Where do the winds go when they’re sleeping?

6.      Ugh, this is exactly like My Little Pony, isn’t it? …Someone nod!

7.      Will you keep track of my behavior? I need to know if I change with the moons or something.

8.      At least the coyotes aren’t wolves coming from the Alps and digging up graves because they're so hungry.

9.      Avalanche!!!!!!

10.  Hey! Are you guys looking for a band name? “Crystal Pavement”

11.  Ice-skating! I didn’t cover ice-skating!

12.  Johnson, the man gets the Age of Johnson! And what does he get? 2 minutes. Because I’m a freakin’ iconoclast!!

13.  Son-of-a-book-seller! No, that’s what he was.

14.  Wait, which one did I say the hobbit was?

15.  We should probably watch Josh Groban singing Kanye’s tweets in class.

16.  All humans should be free enough to be artists.

17.  Your begging is endearing in the sense of…sad.

18.  Oh my god. I just described a jolly rancher.

19.  You guys aren’t from the altoid generation. Here’s how you know: Are your pallets destroyed by altoids? Curiously strong? More like, curiously deadly.

20.  What the hell does Wordsworth mean when he says “visible scene”? [Silence] Snookie’s pregnant.

21.  We can credit or blame Wordsworth for every emo thing in the world. Would there be a The Cure or a The Smiths? No, no there would not be.

22.  The man heart-ed opium.

23.  Can you Kant? Get it?

24.  Poets, man. Livin’ hard and dying young.

25.  He found apprenticing surgery to be quite boring. So he became the romantic martyr to the creative imagination.

26.  Ah, Slim Shady and Keats. Together at last.

27.  When I teach Utopia, people are like, “They all have to wear the same clothes?! That’s INSANE.” But I’m looking out into a sea of Northface’s.

28.  You have to be seasoned to read Moby Dick. [Are you seasoned?] Are you questioning whether I’ve earned my beard? Are you asking me if I’ve woken up in a suit somewhere? Let me tell you something. You don’t own a suit until you wake up in it…outdoors.

29.  Somebody told me the New England Patriots were my New England Patriots. Well, that’s a big responsibility.

30.  Leaves of Grass is no different from Duran Duran’s “I Think We’re Alone Now.”

31.  One year a student wrote on my evaluation, “No one cares about your stupid indie music. Stupid.”

32.  Reckless in love…is a teen after-school drama that I wrote.

33.  I mean, if you can’t handle Daisy Miller, what are you going to do with the Nazis?


Please hire me,
Erin