He is and was the most conflicted liberal I've ever met.
Professor I-Know-More-Than-You continuously espoused his firm belief that President Obama would ascend to soaring Presidential heights in order to solve all of the world's ills. A Presidential Messiah, if you will.
This would be acceptable in a Government class. However, his breathy exaltations proved annoying when in the context of an English course.
Yet, he and his wife are also extreme Catholic pro-life activists who protested outside of Houston's new Planned Parenthood headquarters where Nancy Pelosi was on hand for the festivities.
He labeled my essay decrying the Obama administration repeal of the Mexico City Act which will funnel taxpayer money into the funding of abortion on an international scale as "bombastic" and "incendiary."
Conflicted, for sure.
Anyway, in a futile attempt to tug at our heartstrings and manipulate our emotions into compassion for struggling students on the campus he always tried to tell us the worst hard luck stories he could muster up.....he could have saved his breath.
Our class was comprised of students working several jobs, going to school and juggling family responsibilities.
We all know that attending college is a choice in which some sacrifices must be made. Therefore, his stories about his students in other classes teetering on the brink of starvation because of their tuition expense or working so hard they found themselves in near fatal car accidents just made most of us roll our eyes.
If those stories are true I think Professor Know-It-All was getting played for a fool by some calculating kids who knew they could milk him for vending machine money and/or an assignment extension.
So, one class period he fires up his propaganda machine and starts telling us the gut-wrenching story of one particularly unfortunate student of his who has been bounced around from foster home to foster home her entire life because her hippie mom abandoned her. She eventually goes to live with her grandma who arranges a much-anticipated reunion with the girl's mom who does show up but lets it slip within the girl's earshot that she only came because the grandma paid her to.
Sound familiar?
It should, because it's the main plot line of the classic book "The Great Gilly Hopkins."
Never one to restrain my thoughts I blurted out to Professor Know-It-All "Hey, by any chance is this girl named Gilly Hopkins?"
I won. I actually transformed a relatively shameless man into a state of embarrassed sheepishness as he strained to immediately change the subject to something else.
Awesome.
I'm positive Professor Know-It-All had previously enraptured countless classes with his harrowing tale of human misery that turned out to be completely fictional.
The moral of the story is to teach your kids not to be beholden to any one person and elevate them to an impossibly high status because for the most part people lie.
People do lie, but I hereby solemnly swear that this post is the honest truth. :)
