This kid is the new Wint and will be making $1 million a year tweeting brilliant non sequiturs while his English professors collect piles of rejection letters for their failed Great American Novelshttps://t.co/aQdmHRgZxz— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 11, 2020
I had to look up Wint. He's "one of the most notable accounts associated with 'Weird Twitter,' a subculture on the site that shares a surreal, ironic sense of humor." Notable and duly noted. Don't let that distract you. Click on the image and read the wonderful English paper that still somehow gets a D.
ADDED: I think the 2 checks over "class role as a 'house cat'" suggest why he didn't fail outright. He'd absorbed some left-wing ideology. That was worth something.
PLUS: I had to look up "Midnight Society," written above "Submitted for the approval of English 101." To me "Submitted for your approval" is the classic line from "The Twilight Zone" (a show I watched when it originally aired and currently have 50+ episodes of on our DVR). The Midnight Society comes from a 90s TV show "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" where some teenagers who called themselves "The Midnight Society" told each other scary stories, beginning with "Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society..." The creator of the show intended that line as an allusion to "The Twilight Zone."
It's funny to me that the student wrote about Tom and Jerry instead of the older, grander "Great Gatsby" and the teacher wrote about "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" instead of the older, grander "Twilight Zone."
Do I watch those episodes of "The Twilight Zone"? Yes! I watched "Mr. Bevis" over the weekend after I read that Orson Bean had died. And I watched "The Howling Man" last night.
ALSO: Do I think the Tom & Jerry paper is real? No. I think it's a joke, a fantastic joke. Let's follow Alexis De Wokeville on Twitter.
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53 comments:
Agitprop in the middle gets points? Bad cliche elsewhere overcomes any value it had.
I think the instructor recognizes the wit displayed by the student, and that is why he didn't give the paper an "F." However, as the paper was completely non responsive to the actual assignment, how could it deserve anything higher than a "D"?
What to do with this student?
Well, if the rule is, Answer the Question Asked, then you'll know what to do.
This submission deserves an F. If there's anything in life which s/b known by everyone, I mean tout de monde, it's the correct spelling of Wile E. Coyote. This kid probably didn't even use an Acme word processor.
"However, as the paper was completely non responsive to the actual assignment, how could it deserve anything higher than a "D"?"
It deserved an F is my point.
Should teacher share
Student work on Twitter?
I give him an F
The lessons of my first year of undergrad: Sometimes the last minute BS sticks to the wall, sometimes it doesn't. If you wait until the night before the term paper is due, you at least had better figure out which professor is likely to reward this kind of humorous BS and which isn't (even if that means actually showing up in class.)
It reminds me of the kid that wrote a resume as Groot.
https://www.lovewhatmatters.com/i-am-groot-student-gets-95-100-on-epic-resume-cover-letter-assignment-repeating-famous-marvel-catchphrase-hundreds-of-times/
Someday that kid will be CEO of some Fortune 500.
If you grade on a curve and the other assignments sucked too, a D is not out of the question. Hell with a grade curve a B- is not out of the question...
It's a classic submission by someone who didn't really read the book. I often gave a couple of bonus points for a really good wrong answer, but not on a test that was deserving of an F.
Either the student knows this guy has a comic twitter schtick, or this essay is in fact part of his comic twitter schtick.
It's schticky.
You have 50+ episodes of one program on your DVR? You must be disciplined with the rest of your space, because I am constantly at 80%+ full and could never devote that much space to one show. Of course, I record more than I watch.
I want to see one of the A papers. Doubt they are half as good as our comments on The Gatsby Project here at Althouse.
Was "Howling Man" the one that takes place in the 1930s and the monks have a person who turns out to be Satan imprisoned in a cell? The cell was kept locked by the "staff of truth" or something like that. One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes.
An F was deserved with perhaps an appreciative comment about creativity.
Colleges charge too much so they can’t give out any F grades. It’s a business. The head of the department will bump up the grade to a B.
That’s hilarious.. and refreshing. Outside the box thinking.
@wint is a comic genius.
“The Howling Man” might be my all-time favorite Twilight Zone episode.
Maybe the kid was riffing on the imprecise question that the teacher asked.
What exactly does Tom want with Jerry He didn't say IN the book The Great Gatsby. When you ask an open ended or imprecise question, expect to get some weird answers.
Tom and Jerry could be anyone in that question. That the kid took it to the Looney Tunes Cinematic Universe is hysterical. And he is pretty spot on. Tom had to fulfill his position as "House Cat" How else is he going to get free food and pets.
Ask better questions.
:-D
Do people still think IowaHawk is funny? How about Frank J?
I wanted to keep reading. That's the first and most difficult challenge for any writer.
Teacher gets an F for not correcting Looney Tunes to Hanna-Barbera. Though props for getting “Tunes” right.
Does the Wiley want to eat the Roadrunner? Its unclear. Given his ability to mail order anvils, dynamite, rope, and in one cartoon a bulldozer, its clear he could order sirloin steak every day. He doesn't' want to eat him, its the thrill of the chase.
Pepe is just romantic. Skunk "impregnation" of a cat is biologically impossible.
Given the vulgarity and left-wing stupidity of most English teachers, just have them teach cartoons. They can handle that. Leave The Great Gatsby alone.
In my high school years, a couple of characters moonlighting from Industrial Arts in the 11th grade World History class earned a degree of immortality. When asked to submit an essay on Otto von Bismarck, they came up with papers on Bismarck, North Dakota.
Great guys, both.
Charles Beaumont wrote the "Howlin man" and died a strange death at 38, he had a wierd disease that aged him prematurely. He looked like a 95 y/o man when he died. Lot of SF good sixties writers died young: Beaumont, Sterling, Phillip Dick, Gene L. Coon. The crappy ones lived forever.
Mama should never have allowed me to watch The Twilight Zone. Finally, in my 60s I'm realizing it formed more of my character than Sunday School ever did. Existential is no way for a pretty hillbilly girl to go through life.
Skunk "impregnation" of a cat is biologically impossible.
Pepe doesn't know it's cat. The cat always gets white paint on it's back right before she catches Pepe's eye.
But even if Pepe knew it was a cat and knew that a skunk can't get a cat pregnant, Pepe would still think it was worth a try.
Who can ever forget Frank J's riff on the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal? Frank J confessed to putting his pups in little mortarboard caps and making them take general knowledge quizzes.
Good times, good times. We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.
By the way, isn't this a prank? Alexis de Wokeville? Really? Iowahawk?
It reminds me of the training session on detecting frauds conducted at one of the big accounting firms by a moonlighting magician. The only guy out of 50 who figured it out without being told said, "Well, there was magician at the front of the room, so I knew something was up."
Why did the rabbit break it off with the skunk?
He hadn't had all he wanted, but he'd had all he could stand.
@dril. Best handle ever.
Most of the undergrads I had couldn't have read that, much less written it. If I had gotten a witty, literate, offering like that as an essay, I would have given it a 'C' out of gratitude.
Narr
It's a hoax of course
What exactly was the question? We infer that it was something to do with Great Gatsby, but how can we be sure?
Don't we really need to see the papers that were responsive to the assignment? I wrote a paper on Fitzgerald when I was in college, and I doubt it had any real intellectual content superior to this critical analysis of Hanna Barbera.
Narr,
That was my first thought, too- a hoax by the professor.
Oddly enough, just the other day this story appeared in the Telegraph about
Hanna, Barbera, and the beginnings of Tom and Jerry in 1939
tcrosse,
Yes, I had read that Sunday morning.
I agree it’s a prank. I just like it.
“ Was "Howling Man" the one that takes place in the 1930s and the monks have a person who turns out to be Satan imprisoned in a cell? The cell was kept locked by the "staff of truth" or something like that. One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes.”
Yes. It was kind of bad. Preachy with very stagey acting. But it might make a big impression on a young person. I don’t think I’d seen it before.
Bet you 'ten to one' that the "kid" writing the paper is 'White' and if he were a 'minority' the grade would improve!
Yes. It was kind of bad. Preachy with very stagey acting. But it might make a big impression on a young person. I don’t think I’d seen it before.
It made a big impression on me as a kid. Even then I thought it was kind of silly especially the part where the man in the cell morphs into a carnival funhouse version of the devil. And the plot structure was the same as so many Twilight Zone episodes, to the extent where you could guess what would happen. E.g., I knew the man in the cell was evil from the start and once we found out that he was indeed the devil I knew that the visitor would release him in the end. Even so, I liked it. It was like reading a Boy's Life short story. It was satisfyingly creepy and the emergence of the devil in all his evil (and funhouse sartorial) glory was very cool for a young boy to see.
Most of the Twilight Zone episodes were preachy to one degree or the other. That's okay. So are the best fairy tales. The Twilight Zone universe was sentient and ruthlessly moralistic. Traits that appeal to kids with their rigid sense of right and wrong.
I connect that phrase to Rod Serling too, but the internet tells me it was only used in three "Twilight Zone" episodes.
Speaking of "Gatsby," today's "Gentry Liberals" are like the Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
“Pepe is just romantic. Skunk "impregnation" of a cat is biologically impossible.”
But Pepe doesn’t know she’s a cat. He always mistakes her for a skunk. So, in his mind, it is possible.
Why are there no marks for his abysmal grammar? My eye is twitching over here.
I got an F+ on the first paper I turned in as a freshman, and that was about average in that class. The prof said that in the past he had handed out K's and L's
but none of us were that bad.
"Alexis" is a comedy writer, not an English professor. I must be less jaded than I'd thought because I never believed a student could confuse Tom and Gatsby with Tom and Jerry
Also, Tom and Jerry are Hanna Barbera, not Loony Tunes.
I just came from Instapundit where it had a Titania McGrath link. Weird.
It's an excellent spoof because the "student" is so erudite. D students obviously do not chatter about cinematic universes, nemeses, impregnation, class roles and "house cats." And the whole idea of exploring Tom's goals is delightful.
I thought "Elmer Fudd wants to shoot Bugs (and who doesn't ?)" was brilliant. Also the checks for class role and house cat.
"I just came from Instapundit where it had a Titania McGrath link. Weird."
I didn't see that, but the Twitter name is a known comedian (not a real professor) and it's not the Titania McGrath person, Andrew Doyle. Doyle said on Joe Rogan's show that he had other characters on Twitter that have yet to be discovered but I don't see how that could include this Alexis De Wokeville — @MrAlexisPereira — because Alexis Pereira is a real person, a known comedian.
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