Mysterious Student Messages
The Twilight Zone
...of student emails.
(Image from Wikipedia)
"You are about to enter another dimension, .... the middle ground between light and shadow, .... an area which we call ... the Twilight Zone."
I sometimes think of Rod Serling's words when I open student emails, for I can find myself lost in a twilight realm. For example, here's an email that confronted me at three o'clock this morning:
Good evening professor.This email apparently comes from an appreciative student, one who likes my 'sensible teaching', but it provides no student name, no course title, and no identification of the desired 'handout file'. It's even less enlightening than the email that I commented upon five days ago.
I'm a student of your class, and have a request that may I have a handout file by this e-mail please?
Thank you and see you tommorow morning.
P.S.: Your teaching is so sensible that I was very interested last class which was my first class.
Thus am I "here in the twilight, here in the twi-i-i-i-light, twilight zone..."
Labels: Rod Serling, Students, Twilight Zone
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 4:28 AM
10 comments
10 Comments:
"Mr. K,
Might you go further in your laying out the plan you discussed during the first summer semester. It seemed so sensible that I cannot see why so many thought you were joking.
I want to write my paper in this class I'm taking now so I can get a good grade. At this new campus they do not seem aware of what you meant."
JK cannot for proprietys' sake divulge the name of the student but I will give my response to him:
"Mr, So & So, ?. Sincerely, JK"
JK
JK, I see that you receive mysterious emails of the twilit zone, too -- even without your being a teacher ... I assume.
Or are you a teacher?
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Nope,
Just that comments seem (when one is beyond the actual teachers chronological age) credible by the teachers' saying, "Doggone, I've never thought of it like that..."
Just that the teacher missed the allusion to the USS Turner Joy and the USS Maddux and thought JK was talking about the real fellow named Lester Maddox.
It was wordplay on "The Gulf of Tonkin" incident, and the US Civil Rights Movement.
It was a joke, JK simply didn't realize at the time that no one present realized the confluence of timeline. (And apparently none of the fellow students bothered to look it up - or ask their parents).
"Po po tweet."
JK
I guess the older generation looked at our generation like that when we didn't understand their allusions to WWII.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Jeff,
I disagee (somewhat) with your parallel. We had Col.Brink. Coy. I'm not certain but I suspect you did a "duck and cover." But I guess we were saddled by the "Elvis thing" which our, no I take that back (I'm too young) generation dealt with.
Being on the cusp of a teaching revolution, and having a dad that did the WWII thing, (you did a course in Civics, no?) we were schooled where there was a general knowledge thing. If you said, your Grandfather said, "there is a tide", we each knew that the speaker was saying, "get off your rear, the time is now!"
I ask my fellow students what they know of Antietam, the answers are similar to Tel Aviv.Did you see Miss Carolina explain why todays students couldn't find the US on a map? Was Benjamin Disraeli the first President of modern Israel or an album by Cream? Cream?
Eric Clapton was never in a band. He has always been just Eric Clapton. An outhouse is where you park the John Deere riding mower. December 8th 1980 was not the day John Lennon died that's just three weeks before Christmas!
Tom Paine? Well I guess I'll have to go to the grocery store and look at to newest National Enquirer, he must be in a movie with Johnnie Depp. Magna Carta? Oh that's what Mexicans deliver tequila with fruit flavored ice on.
Moses? Oh yeah he was a geat NFL player. Levi? Oh about thirty bucks. The first US guy killed in Viet Nam was in 1947? Where you buying your dope!
"Out of Africa, my rear end, my folks emigrated from Ireland!" "Jesus was a Christian and he wrote the Bible!"
The world is flat, Eratosthenes didn't know the shadow of a well from a hole in the ground.
God said, "Let there be light" and so he invented Matchlight charcoal. And doggone it he ordered his Angels to do it from a cellphone. That's why we get bills you dummy!
JK
I was speaking more of our generation than of us specifically, but I think that through my own Grandpa Perryman, I was more in touch with WWI than WWII. We had a photograph of him and his brother Joseph Perryman in their doughboy helmets, and Grandpa always kept his WWI rifle in our home, so every morning as he set out for the town square, I thought that he was heading off to the Great War...
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Hey Jeff,
CV-63 is having some trouble accessing his regular. They did an "upgrade." Recall the first address I came onto "Gypsy?" That will work too but I simply placed just "something#" and that should be the address of choice until Microsoft gets its' act together.
tech
Tech, I think that I understand.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Oh gosh, I've never thought you could be this funny. That email seems to be really ridiculously mysterious at 3am haha. I so happen to love the way you "Thus am I "here in the twilight, here in the twi-i-i-i-light, twilight zone..." :D
Anonymous . . . thanks. I guess that we must know each other, but I find myself again in the Twilight Zone over a message...
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
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