Adventures in Teaching

A couple of happenings at school today:

All of the Ute fans in my B2 government class secretly proclaimed today Ute pride day. They are quite aware of my love of Jimmer and all things BYU, so they proudly wore their University of Utah t-shirts to tease me. I asked them if they were celebrating their loss to UNLV last night and left it at that. Pretty funny kids.

A student in my current issues class told me that he was going to take on the persona of Karl Marx for the duration my class. He told me that he wanted to be called Karl (not his real name, though it does start with a K), and I started to call him Karl Marx, so he ran with it. He made arguments in favor of socialized medicine, trying to tell me that the medical innovation that the Nazis developed in their inhumane treatment of Jews far surpassed anything that the market could produce. I kindly reminded him that Hitler was not a communist. He took time to editorialize that he wasn't actually a Marxist, but he would act like one in my class. When asked what he really was, he said he was an anarchist. To further establish my intellectual dominance, I asked him if he was an anarcho-capitalist or an anarcho-syndicalist. That one stumped him. He claimed that he had read the Wikipedia article on anarcho-syndicalism, but couldn't remember what it was. All the other kids in the class think he is a genius and ask him to use smaller words. He's a pretty bright kid, and to his credit, he had the curiosity to write down what I said so he could go look it up. It's going to be a fun class.