“Let Me Tell You a Story”
A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems
Cliff Williams
PDF file of the whole collection
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Classroom Anecdotes, 45–66
Sometimes unusual things happen in class.
Dragged Along the Hallway
It was the second Tuesday in December, 2003. The class was Philosophy 350 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and the classroom was McLennan 211. I had brought a tangled clothesline to class so that the students in the class could have a tug-of-war. This was to illustrate the internal tug-of-war that takes place between our attraction to the good and our resistance to it, an idea that is prominent in Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing.
I sat in front of the class on a wood stool, which I had placed only two feet from the desk in which Mike was sitting. I took the tangled heap from my left shoulder, where I had placed it when I left my office, and dropped it onto Mike’s desk. He promptly started trying to unravel it. I tried to keep it tangled. He noticed that I was doing that after some seconds and remarked on it. Someone asked why I had brought the rope. I said that we were going to have a tug-of-war. Someone said that we should have a camera present. I said I would go back to my office and get mine, which I happened to have brought with me to school that day.
The class consisted of two females and six males. The two females and five of the males were present on this day. When I got back to the classroom with my camera, the two females were in the process of tying up four of the males in front of the classroom. The fifth male was sitting on the heat register in the back of the room watching the proceedings. The two females wrapped the group of males twice around and tied the rope. They declared that they wanted to drag the group down the hallway. I said, “Okay, but don’t make too much noise,” as there were classrooms on both sides of the hallway. So they dragged the group of males into the hallway.
The four males staggered along. The untied male egged the females on. I watched. When the group got to the end of the hallway, the females dragged them back the other way until they got them back into the classroom. We proceeded with the class session, though we didn’t do the tug-of-war.
A Loose Squirrel
I had started the class with a reading. Three-quarters of the way through, two or three students to my left started whispering among themselves. I ignored it and continued to read. When I finished, there was some commotion among the same students. One of them said, “There’s a rat in the ceiling.” He pointed upward to a place behind me at the front of the classroom.
I looked. One of the ceiling tiles had been moved out of place, leaving a gap in the ceiling. In it, a squirrel’s tail was hanging down.
Without thinking, I instinctively dragged a desk to a spot just below the tail, hiked up on the seat part, reached for the tail and yanked it, not too hard, but hard enough that the rest of the squirrel followed the tail.
The squirrel fell to the floor—no doubt on its feet, for it quickly scrambled underneath the classroom’s desks. The males in the class, ever ready to make things right, jumped to their feet and cornered the squirrel. The females jumped to their feet to watch the activity. Someone brought over the wastebasket and someone else brought over a notebook. Soon a couple of the males had the squirrel in the wastebasket covered with the notebook.
They carried the arrangement out of the classroom, but the squirrel extricated itself from its moving prison and landed on the floor of the hallway. It ran behind a large plastic trash receptacle in the hallway. The males crowded around the trash receptacle, but the squirrel did not cooperate.
Finally, though, they got the squirrel into the wastebasket again, placed a large piece of cardboard over it, and marched out the building, accompanied by the rest of the class and me. There they deposited the squirrel into the flower bed beside the building’s steps. In another minute, everyone returned to the classroom, where I resumed the class session.
The Cuban Cigar
We were talking about Nietzsche in PH 350 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the fall of 2001. I said, “Maybe next time I will be Nietzsche.” Then I said, “Hmmm. I think I will need a prop for that. Maybe a Cuban cigar.”
I don’t know why a Cuban cigar came to mind just then. Maybe it was because I have several former students who like to smoke them. One of them, in fact, has smuggled Cuban cigars into the United States from Canada.
One time this student had two boxes of Cuban cigars he wanted to bring into the U.S. He stopped at the Canadian–U.S. border crossing, took the two boxes out of his car, and tried stuffing them into the pockets of his coat, so that the U.S. border inspectors would not find them. He couldn’t get them into the pockets, and he didn’t want to put them into the trunk of his car. So in desperation he hid them under some stuff on the back floor of his car. When he looked up after doing so, he saw two Canadian Mounties off in the distance laughing at him. They must, he figured, have witnessed this scene before. He shrugged his shoulders, got into his car, and drove across the border without incident.
I didn’t think of my in-class remark until several days later. As I approached my office door in the morning, I saw that a clear, plastic bag had been tacked to the bulletin board on it. I opened the bag and found a cigar. The label on the cigar said, “Montecristo Habana,” and the note accompanying the cigar said, “To Prof. Columbo from Pooh’s friends. Authentic Cuban.” “Authentic Cuban” was underlined. Obviously, I had to take the cigar to class.
I did. Plus matches. After the students had assembled, I took out the cigar and told them it had appeared mysteriously on my office door. Then I took a match out of the matchbox, grasped it in my right hand, and made as if to strike it on the side of the matchbox. One student gasped. Another’s face lit up. A Trinity College professor was going to smoke in class!!
I only pretended to light the cigar. But for the rest of the class period I “smoked” it as I also pretended to be Nietzsche.
I kept the cigar in my office, ready to be smoked, until the day I stopped teaching. I have never found out who gave it to me.
Knife Day
When my stuffed bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, came back from mainland China with Peter, he had a small, red pocket knife attached to him. Usually Pooh comes back with a pin from wherever he has been, but this time it was a knife.
Several years later, Peter was killed in a fiery car collision. It happened a year after he graduated. He was on his way to Chicago’s O’Hare airport where he was going to meet his mother, whom he had not seen for three years. The knife acquired sentimental value for me.
Pooh went to visit Erick with the knife attached. I thought, “Maybe I should take the knife off, just in case something happens to it.” But I let it go.
Pooh came back from his visit with Erick without the knife. I was stricken. I asked Erick about it. He didn’t know, and he couldn’t find it.
Erick graduated. Three years later he popped into my office. “Do you remember that knife I lost?” he asked. I did, indeed. “Well, I felt so bad about it that I got you another one.” He pulled out a hand tool set that contained a pair of pliers, two knife blades, a saw, two screwdrivers, a scissors, and a can opener, all in one handy implement. It was encased in a cloth holder that could be attached to one’s belt. I promptly attached it to my belt and wore it for the rest of the day, and the next day, too.
That semester I was teaching Problems in Philosophy, a senior course with eight students in it, all male. One day shortly after acquiring the replacement knife, I said in class, “Let’s have a knife day. Bring a distinctive knife for show and tell.”
The day came. I closed the door to the classroom, showed the class my new knife set, and told them the story of how I had gotten it. Someone had brought a machete with a ten inch blade. Someone else had brought an even longer African knife. Various other knives were produced, all accompanied with much admiration, except for the common table knife one of the students had pilfered from the cafeteria. He was booed.
A year and a half later I threw a party to celebrate having taught college for thirty years. Josh, one of the students present at knife day, came. All of us at the party got to reminiscing about memorable college events. Josh said that he liked knife day, and, he said, the part he liked best was that it was illegal.
“Illegal?” I asked.
“Yes. Against college rules,” he replied.
“Really?” I asked with astonishment.
“You can’t have a knife with a blade longer than two and a half inches.”
“Oooooh.” I said. “I see. . . . If I had known that, I wouldn’t . . . . Hmmm. Actually, I can’t say what I would have done.”
Josh grinned. “I bet you would have had knife day anyway,” he responded.
I grinned back.
The Big But
Midway through the spring 1992 semester, give or take a few years, I was explaining the first two paragraphs of the introduction to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to my large Introduction to Philosophy class. The first paragraph begins with, “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.” The second paragraph begins with, “But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.”
I explained the ideas in the first paragraph—we cannot have knowledge unless we first have sense experience—and gave an example or two. This claim is made by empiricists, often to support their view. But Kant is no empiricist. He thinks that even though we cannot have knowledge without first having sense experience, some of our knowledge is not derived from that experience. So the second paragraph is an important qualification of the first.
After explaining the ideas in the first paragraph, I exclaimed, “And now comes the big but.”
The class roared with laughter. For a second I was puzzled. Then I realized my faux pas. I paused for a bit, smiled wanly, then proceeded with my explanation of Kant.
The academic dean was at the lunch table that day, and when I told her my little episode, she too laughed heartily.
The Two Stools
The wood stools were thirty inches high. I took them to class one day so as to have a debate between the two philosophers students had read that day—William James and W. K. Clifford.
James was a fideist and Clifford an evidentialist. Clifford’s view was that no one was justified in believing anything without sufficient evidence. James opposed that, saying that although evidence was needed to believe some things, other things could justifiably be believed without sufficient evidence.
When I sat on one stool, I was going to be James, and when I sat on the other stool I would be Clifford.
I explained the two views and started the debate. Back and forth I went.
Then it happened. I wasn’t paying attention as I approached one of the stools, and I tried to sit on it too soon. I fell to the floor, taking the stool with me.
An audible gasp came from the class.
Unfazed and unhurt, I got up, righted the stool, and kept right on going with the debate.
Sometimes you just have to take risks.
Through the Window
I was going to class extra early one day. On the way, I met Jenny, who was also headed to class early as well. I don’t know who brought up the idea, but one of us, probably me, said, “We should go through the window.” The other replied, “Sure.”
We went to investigate.
The classroom was on the ground floor, and the bottom of the window was only two and a half to three feet off the ground.
It was a relatively warm day, and we found that the window was open. We easily removed the screen and climbed in, then replaced the screen.
No one else had arrived to class, and no one saw us. Nor did we tell anyone in the class what we had done. It was our secret for the whole class period.
Plato’s Cave
For a number of years I had my honors Introduction to Philosophy class read Plato’s Republic. That is where Plato uses his famous cave story to illustrate the main features of his philosophy.
In it, the people who are in the cave can see only the shadows that are cast upon a wall of the cave by moving figures in front of a fire. The people do not know that there is anything other than those images, until someone makes their way out of the cave into the sunlight. That person realizes that living in the sunlight is so much better than living in the cave, and they go back into the cave to try to persuade the people there to make their way out of the cave as well.
One year it occurred to me that the class could reenact the story when we got to the cave story in The Republic.
I gathered a bunch of paper grocery store bags, brought them to class, and said, “Today we are going to reenact Plato’s cave story. We all are going to put a bag over our heads and pretend we are in a cave. I will be the person who has seen the sunlight and will try to convince you to leave the cave. Some of you will be convinced and will come with me. And then those of you who have come with me into the sunlight will go back to the cave and try to convince the others also to go out into the sunlight.”
Everyone except me put a bag on their head. I convinced six or seven of the class of fifteen to twenty students to come out to the sunlight with me. They held each other’s hands as I slowly led the group, single file, into the hallway and through double doors to the outside.
There everyone took their bag off, and I said, “See how wonderful it is to be in the sunlight instead of having a bag over your head! Let’s go back and try to convince the others to come out.”
We went back to the classroom, and those who had gone outside with me tried to convince the others to go outside. Some of the bagged persons were convinced and were led outside, where they took off their bags.
Others who were in the cave were not convinced. They talked back: “I am used to this. Why should I go out?” “Nothing can be better than the shadows on the wall.” “You are just being selfish in wanting me to do what you did. Go away.”
After a bit, I ended the reenactment. We resumed out seats and debriefed.
Occasionally, the verbal altercation got heated. Once, the altercation became physical. Two of the persons who had been outside tried to carry off one of the bagged persons. But the bagged person vigorously fought back. That scared me, and I instantly called it all off.
In the debriefing that day, someone said, “Sometimes people want others to do what is right so strongly that they force the others to do it.”
I asked, “Was anyone surprised to see that happen right here in this classroom?”
I also asked, “Is it better to have a society in which everyone is forced to believe the same religion or one in which everyone is free to believe as they wish?”
That day, the reenactment had gotten a little too real.
A Birthday Faux Pas
In the weeks preceding my fortieth birthday, in December of 1983, I started thinking about my mortality. Something about being forty had prompted me to imagine myself being present at my own funeral, no longer getting up each morning, no longer doing my daily things. For the first time, I felt that I myself would die some day.
I had, of course, known that everyone dies and that therefore I would as well. But, as Soren Kierkegaard observed, there is a difference between knowing about death in the abstract and feeling that oneself will die. One can even, he said, know about one’s own death abstractly. That, I think, is what I had done until those weeks before turning forty.
When my birthday falls on a school day, students have occasionally wished me a happy birthday. My fortieth birthday fell on a school day, and I hoped not to have anyone notice, given the freight I had attached to it.
However, my afternoon class sang me happy birthday, with large and friendly smiles on their faces.
I don’t remember whether I thanked them, but I distinctly remember that I told them I had recently realized I would die. I said some things about that, and as I did, those large and friendly smiles slowly disappeared, and the faces they had graced turned grave and deadly serious.
I started the class without so much as a pause.
It took four or five years for me to recognize what I had done. I had not graciously welcomed my student’s good wishes. I had obliterated their big smiles.
A couple of years after that recognition I was talking with Colleen in a coffee shop. She had been in the class. At some point, I said, ”Do you remember that day in Introduction to Philosophy when all of you sang happy birthday for my fortieth birthday and I responded by talking about my death?”
I had started to laugh as I neared the end of this sentence, and when I ended it, she nodded her head, and we both burst into giggles.
Sometimes we professors do dumb things.
Fire!
On the day I turned sixty, in December of 2003, I walked into my large Introduction to Philosophy class some minutes early, as I usually did. But as I was about to start class, one of the students came to me and said, “Can you wait for just a minute?” I said, “Sure,” wondering what that was about.
I didn’t have long to wait. The door to the classroom opened, and in came Nettie carrying a cake. It was not just any cake, though. It had sixty candles on it, each one lit.
But you couldn’t see the flame of each candle, for they had all coalesced into one large, wild flame two feet tall.
My first thought was, “Uh, oh. I hope no one sees this,” as it was illegal to have open fires in classrooms. or at least against school rules.
My second thought was, ”Oh, no! What if that flame gets to the ceiling and sets it on fire!!?” It was no placid flame. It was leaping and bounding as though it wanted to go places.
For a long minute, the class sang me happy birthday, while I stood there in a mixture of delight and terror, mostly terror.
Then I took as big a breath as I could and just barely blew the flame out to the happy smiles of everyone. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. And when someone produced a knife, I ate a piece of the cake.
A Little Stuffed Bear
During the fall semester of 1984, I read “The Raccoon Coat” to my Logic class, a delightful story about logical fallacies that was in the textbook for the course. The students wanted me to read another story. I said, “No. We have to do logic.” They asked me again and again, and each time I said the same thing.
On my way out of the house the last day of classes for the semester, I pulled a random book of stories off our daughter’s bookshelf—Winnie-the-Pooh—and read one of the stories to the class.
The next semester, in February of 1985, Mike and I were talking about the Pooh story. He had been in the Logic class. I said, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if they made Winnie-the-Pooh into a stuffed bear?”
Mike said, “They have.”
“Where can you get one?” I asked, somewhat surprised.
“At Disney,” Mike replied.
Next week, after coming back from a morning chapel service, a faculty assistant said to me, “There’s someone waiting for you in the faculty lounge.” It had been a blustery morning, so I went to my office, took off my coat, and got myself presentable for the “Someone” in the faculty lounge.
It was a little stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh. He had a note pinned to him that said, “Dear Cliff, I am lonely. Will you take me home? Pooh.”
I immediately picked him up with a big smile, gave him a hug, and said, “Why, of course I’ll take you home, Pooh.” Then I took him up to my office and put him on the arm of my favorite chair.
For the next two months, Pooh sat in my office and from time to time visited students in their rooms. “He never criticizes,” I told them.
Then one day in early April, I stepped out of my office, leaving my door open, as I was going to be gone for only a few minutes. When I returned, I did not notice that Pooh was gone. But Aimée and Tim did a couple of hours later when they stopped by. One of them said, “Where’s Pooh?”
I looked at his favorite sitting spot—the arm of the chair I was sitting on—and said, “He was here just a little while ago.” I looked on the floor beside the chair, then behind it and under it as well, getting on my hands and knees to do the last of these.
“I don’t know where he is,” I said. I was a little undone.
The next day I went to the dining hall for lunch and sat with Bruce and Bob. I told them about Pooh’s having gone missing. I “hired” them as chief detectives, little knowing that it had been Bruce who had abducted Pooh and Bob who had become his accomplice.
During the next month and a half, I got ransom notes from them and letters from others who were impersonating them, a picture of Pooh being held captive, plus a couple of anonymous phone calls telling me to meet someplace on campus, alone, which I did.
During the last week of classes, I walked into the class Bruce and Bob were in. Bob opened one of the jalousie windows, because it was a little warm, he said. Just as I was in the middle of a long sentence, Pooh came flying through the window and landed four or five feet in front of me. It was a perfect flight.
Bob instantly identified himself and Bruce as the abductors. Bruce walked into the classroom a minute later. I, of course, was chagrined that I had been so imaginatively fooled.
Pooh then started on his travels with students when they were going someplace—on choir tours, home for fall break, foreign countries. It became a tradition that whoever he traveled with would put a pin on him from the place he had been.
He went to California in 1989 to sit on the beach, and to the first inauguration of Bill Clinton in January, 1993. He went to Russia, Mexico, Germany, England, Ireland, and mainland China. In the U.S., he went to New Jersey, Colorado, Niagara Falls, North Dakota, and numerous other states. He also visited Stephanie, who knew that at some point she could die from a bone marrow operation, which she later did. (See “Remembering Stephanie” on page 114.) Between the late 1980s and 2012, he made 123 trips with students, and then three more trips with former students after that, each of which I recorded in my Winnie-the-Pooh Scrap Book, which Jennifer gave me.
Pooh also sent birthday letters to students who put their names on the Pooh birthday calendar that hung on my office door, along with a check for one million dollars drawn on the Hunny Pot Bank. He sent over thirteen hundred letters during a span of nearly thirty years. One time, a student who had come from a troubled family said that that was the only birthday “card” he had gotten that year.
Then there were the Pooh parties at our house. A bunch of students dropped by on a Friday evening, I read a Pooh story to them, we danced in a circle round and round and in and out for two and half minutes to the Tigger Song, then ate honey-applesauce cake which I had made.
I was given numerous Pooh paraphernalia, which I kept in my office. Several people gave me Pooh coloring books and crayons, which I took to my coffee shop expeditions. (See Coffee Shop Expeditions on page 76.) I was also given a Pooh watch, which I wore every day for more than twenty-five years until it no longer gave accurate time. One day Big Pooh arrived at my office door—ten times bigger than Pooh—helped there anonymously, though Dani later told me that it was she and Ann who had done that.
One afternoon, I was sitting in my office, with the door ajar, when I heard something slide along the floor just outside my office. Then I heard steps running away. I jumped up, stepped over the book that had been slid along the floor, and ran after the steps. But the person was too fast. To this day I don’t know who gave me that copy of The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. (I was given three other copies as well.)
I once participated in the annual World Poohsticks Championship at a bridge over the River Thames in a little town in southeastern England. Linda and I were spending two months in Oxford, England, during the spring 2008 semester when I was on sabbatical working on a project.
I took a train to within six miles of the little town and walked those six miles along English country roads to get to the town. I paid several pounds for a stick. The sticks had six colors, one color per stick, and you stood on the bridge at the place where the square of your color was. So six people played at a time.
A short man on the bridge yelled, "I am going to count to three, and when I get to three, drop your sticks." Then he yelled, "One, two, three." The dropped sticks rode on the river’s current under the bridge. About fifteen feet on the other side of the bridge there was a rope across the river. (It was about forty or fifty feet wide at that point.) There were two or three judges sitting on one of the banks of the river under the rope who determined what color stick went under the rope first.
I won the first round, but I lost the second round. If you do the arithmetic, you find it takes only six or seven rounds to get a winner out of the thousand people who play.
One evening some years later, Melissa, a former student whose vision had become impaired because of myasthenia gravis, a rare auto-immune disease, called me to ask whether I could read something to her. I said, “Would you like me to read from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, a poem, or a Pooh story?” She chose the Pooh story, which I then read to her over the phone.
Now Pooh sits in my living room on a century-old, handcrafted child’s chair. His red vest is filled with pins of some of the places he has visited. (The rest of the pins are attached to a long ribbon.)
He is a reminder of one strand of the teaching life I engaged in for fifty years, a strand that allowed me to connect to students in a personal way, and a strand that I loved as much as I loved the academic part of the teaching life.
For a full account of Pooh’s abduction, see “Memoir of an Abducted Bear” at www.cliffordwilliams.net/memoirofanabductedbear.
© 2024 by Cliff Williams