Student Bloopers

The following are actual statements written or spoken by my former students:

 

“Saint Thomas Aquinas was born in the Dominican Republic.”  (Thomas was a Dominican monk, a religious Order of the Catholic Church).

 

“Job was a riotous man.”  (Job was a righteous man). 

 

“Aristotle believed that all children came from seamen.”  (Aristotle believed that human life was generated and constituted by semen). When I read this in an  exam I imagined Jason and the Argonauts sailing on the Aegean Sea to Athens …prepared to have a really, really good time.

 

“The Dalai Lama is the spiritual and political leader of Budapest.” (I am not making this up).

 

“Jewish men wear Yamahas on their heads to remind them that they are  below God.”  (With the exception of American Jews of course, who wear Harleys).

“A bodhisattva is an Enlightened Being who doesn’t go all the way.” (Bodhisattvas are Enlightened Beings who experience nirvana but who are not liberated from the chain of rebirths in order to teach others to reach nirvana).

 

As I taught the history of the Crusades in The Christian Tradition course, a student raised his hand and asked, “Where were the Protestants when all this was going on?”  (Uhhhhhh… they were waiting for Martin Luther to come along  in the sixteenth century.)

 

“How could Adam and Eve have lived in a patriarchal society if it was just the two of them?”  (My immediate response to this question was to think, “Oh Man, am I going to have to explain this again?”). 

 

“Catholics believe that Mary was always a virgin, which means that Joseph didn’t get any sex either.”  (No comment).

 

“The ancient Akkadian women would pull men off the streets to participate in their sacred sexual rituals. The men probably didn’t mind this…”

 

“Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgers.”  (Joan was captured by the Burgundians).

 

“Joan of Arc was burned at the steak.” (It seems that for my students, Joan of Arc is intimately connected to beef).

 

“I was always taught that the snake in the Garden represented Jesus.” (I think I just stared at this kid for about 4 minutes… waiting for my head to explode while I tried to figure out what the hell this could mean).

 

“Professor Doire, whatever must you be like, stoned?”

 

“Even if God wasn’t omniscient, World War II would be kind of hard for a god to miss.”  (Indeed.)

 

“Mary Magdalene wasn’t really a whore. She had some good qualities too.”  (Ah, yes… the kind-hearted prostitute, in the tradition of Belle from “Gone with the Wind”).

 

“Voltaire questions God because of the suffrage of children.”  (Voltaire had a problem with children voting?) The misuse of the word “suffrage” for “suffering” occurs more times than I care to think about, even though at the beginning of my “evil and suffering” course I make a point of telling my students that “suffrage” refers to the right to vote.

 

“Jesus was the Carnation of God.” (According to the tradition, Jesus was of course, the Incarnation of God… hard to imagine God wearing a pink Jesus on His lapel).

 

“Socrates was a Christ-like figure.” (I wrote in the margin of this student’s paper, “Considering that Socrates lived about 500 years before Jesus, perhaps Jesus was a Socrates-like figure.”)

 

“Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Christ-like figure.”

 

“Joan of Arc was a Christ-like figure.”

 

“Gandhi  was a Christ-like figure.”

 

“Father Gabriel in ‘The Mission’ was a Christ-like figure.”

 

(Why is it that everybody who dies is a Christ-like figure?)

 

“Saul changed his name to Paul? That doesn’t seem like a very big change to me.”  (I responded, “No, but he still had to change the monogram on his towels.” It took the class about 10 seconds to realize I was kidding.)

 

“Professor Doire, is there something you do everyday to be the way you are?” 

 

“For the first few weeks of class I would go home to my roommates and say, ‘I have this professor who went to Harvard… and I think she drops acid.'”

 

“Socrates argued before his Athenian jurors utilizing the Socratic Method.”  (That’s like saying Darwin was Darwinian, Carl Jung was a Jungian and Franz Kafka was  Kafka-esque).

 

“During Ramadan, Muslims  can’t  have  sex during the day. But  they can do it at night.” (Thank goodness for sundown).

 

And I will conclude this blog post with perhaps the funniest thing that has ever been said in my classroom… I began to tell a story and realized halfway through that the end of the story required that I say a word that might bother some students.  I stopped midway and said to my class, “OK, now I have to say a word that may offend some of you. If it does, I apologize. But wait, we’ve been together almost three months. You know me and I know you. I think we’re quite comfortable with each other at this point and can say anything to each other, right?”

And James, sweet baby James, piped up from the back of the room without skipping a beat, “F**K yeah.”