I think I’m going to start a new segment called top comment of the week. Friday seems like the perfect day to initiate it and I wanted to bring an Andrew Gourlay original into the mix.
On this post about my experience with Netflix and how I did a research paper on it in college, Gourlay threw in this gem:
This is pretty simple and subtle but I think it brings back a lot of memories on school projects that students do throughout their lives. Evan texted me and said, “Gourlay’s comment on your Netflix post had me cracking”. This text was enough votes to make his comment top comment of the week.
A Pagoda
One project that comes to mind that I had was on Pagodas in Ms O’Donnell’s class. This was my junior year and the class was honors and I was easily the dumbest kid in the class. Future knowledge tells me that all the kids in this class got into Harvard, Penn, and Yale and I got denied from Penn State just to give you an idea. My best friend in the class, Dave Kreig, had the religion Shinto for his project and we knew ahead of time that we were screwed because you had to give a presentation in front of the class. This was pre easy access to internet and I was using websites like Askjeeves and physical books in the library for research. I had done a horrible job as I did with most projects in comparison to the other students and it was my turn to present. I did my deal and Splinter 
(our nickname for the teacher because she resembled the rat Splinter from TMNT) asked me what was the most important feature of the Pagoda’s structure. Naturally I didn’t find that in my research and if I remember correctly it was that they were built to sway but she was dumbfounded that I hadn’t included this tidbit.
This wasn’t even the straw that broke that camel’s back for this honors class for me. I basically cut and pasted an entire segment from Encarta on Lewis and Clark and turned in a paper. She returned the paper with a red “see me” on the back and I knew I was fucked. This was in the 4th quarter with about 6 more weeks of school left and I basically ignored her of the remaining 6 weeks in class and breezed through with a B or C in the class.
Same class and this is so bad (on my part) but she used to leave the answer key on the front of her desk before 10 question quizzes that were worth 10% of your grade each time. Dave and I would systematically take trips up to sharpen our pencil and get any type of answer we could see off of the answer key. We used to share the info with the hot girls around us and it made us feel really important but it shows you how stupid I was. If I didn’t copy off people in high school, my 3.6 final GPA could have easily been in that less than 3.0 range.
I didn’t expect this post to turn into a long winded ramble of high school which makes me think I should make a post on all my childhood projects because I had a lot of fun retelling this one. Amazing that one comment on Fjords could spur so much useless knowledge.
i loved that post because i too had Mrs. O’Donnell for world history honors and i can totally recall her class. she was very passionate about the subject and 90% of the other students were the sincerely interested in school types who went off to top schools. i disliked most of those kids because you knew their parents pushed them and they all had this air of superiority. anyway, good post, although i don’t condone cheating.