Now this is the kind of essay I try to get my students to write, but all they ever want to write about is the first time they got drunk and vomited cheese-steak into their own hair, then “hooked up” with somebody who “didn’t respect” them the next morning.
From The New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmers” Department, here’s Andrew Barlow’s pithy “All I Really Need To Know I Learned By Having My Arms Ripped Off By A Polar Bear”:
For me, wisdom came not at the top of the graduate-school mountain nor buried in the Sunday-school sandpile. For me, wisdom arrived during a visit to the home of our trusted friend the polar bear. Actually, I suppose ‘trusted friend’ is something of a misnomer, because last year I had my arms brutally ripped from my torso by a fifteen-hundred-pound Norwegian polar bear. How and why this happened is an interesting story. For now, though, let’s take a look at some fun lessons about our good friend Ursus maritimus, the polar bear. Here’s what I learned:
2 Replies to “(No) Arms and the Man”
Well I wrote an essay this morning for a final on the connection between Humean associationism and Benthamite utilitarianism, so perhaps that’s in the happy middle between this sort of wackiness and whatever your students write.
Plus without editorial intervention their writing is rife with typos. Losers…