Jessie: On the coast of Maine soaking up every bit of sea and sun left before the crisp autumn air arrives!
September is full of fresh starts, new experiences, and even some unexpected results. Each week this month I wanted to ask about something that ended up being surprisingly good. So today, since it is the first week of school for so many students I wondered about a class or a bit of research that ended up being more interesting than you would have expected.
Edith/Maddie: I had a youngish woman for a history/civics/social studies (memory fails me on specifics) class in high school, Mrs. Belmont, whom I liked a lot. One day Mr. Thompson, also youngish, came in. The two of them started arguing out loud about something. Both were insulting and unreasonable. We were all horrified. It turned out to be a planned performance that they turned into a lesson about conflict resolution. At a time when the Vietnam War was in full swing and many were in conflict domestically as well, the lesson made a big impact on me.
Sherry: It’s hard to pick just one incident. I was blessed with many wonderful teachers. I think one of my favorite and hardest classes was in advanced Shakespeare class. The teacher was tough, the students were brilliant, and I learned to look at those plays in a whole different light.
Barb: In the early 1970s campuses were in turmoil. And so with the English department at the University of Pennsylvania. Until my sophomore year, the department required a two-semester senior seminar to graduate with an English major. That was done away with and a new two-semester freshman seminar was put in its place to enter the major. I was one of the students who slipped through, required to do neither. As I result, I realized I could graduate a semester early if I added one more English class to my fall schedule senior year. I was already dating Bill, who would become my husband and who lived in Boston at the time, so I had carefully stacked all my classes into Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday. (Which turned out to be a disaster but that’s a different story.) One class met my schedule and criteria of 4:00-5:30 pm Tuesday and Thursday, “The Western Through Film and Literature.” I started it expecting nothing. It turned out to be one of the hardest courses I took in college and probably had more impact on my thinking about the world and about myself than all but one other course. I wrote my term paper on the expanding universes of Larry McMurtry’s first three novels, Horseman, Pass By (Hud), Leaving Cheyenne (Loving Molly), and the Last Picture Show. I like to think it may have been among the first college papers ever written about his work.
Jessie: Wow, Barb! I wonder if any of that experience can be seen in your novels and the way that you construct them. I find that the research that I do always leads to surprising discoveries which often turn out to be useful and interesting. To date, one of the things most surprising was the research I did on pigeon racing in the interwar period and how it was influenced by the economic class structure of the UK at the time. Fascinating!
Readers, your turn! Tell us about a learning experience that turned out to be better than you would have guessed it would be.
The Wickeds 
I don’t know if this is exactly what you are looking for but the most interesting learning experience I’ve had isn’t from school days. In fact, I found school to be rather mundane and boring. Not because I’m super smart or anything but when I was going the teachers looked down on alternative ways for becoming interested in subjects. I had a teacher doing Greek mythology who GOT MAD at me because when I aced the test, she asked how I did so well. I told her it came from reading Thor comic books. When she realized I was talking about Norse gods, she said but that’s about Norse gods. I told her the comics got me interested in Norse mythology which then got me interested in Greek mythology. She was not happy about what my 6th grade self saw as a perfectly logical progression towards acing the test.
My most interesting learning experiences actually come from music. The Iron Maiden song “Alexander the Great” got me interested in learning about him. And in recent years, the band Sabaton has served as a constant learning experience.
The band’s singer and bass player are both gigantic history nerds. Their songs are all about the places, people and battles throughout the history of warfare. But it’s not just their 3-4 minute songs that introduced me to heroes like the Night Witches, Witold Pilecki (the baddest mofo I’ve ever heard of…he volunteered to go undercover in Auschwitz to get the truth and get it out to the world. He’s immortalized now in the song “Prisoner 8459”), the Smoking Snakes and more, their videos for the song are instructive as well. You have the standard performance videos of course, but they have a separate video channel on Youtube called the Sabaton History Channel that delves into much more detail about the subjects of their songs with new versions of the videos for the songs that give more of an overview. That’s how I learned so much about the most decorated woman in the history of warfare and how she showed up at an event honoring heroes of WWI. People asked who she was and she revealed to them her story and the chestful of honors she’d won as a fighter during the war…before fading away into obscurity.
The band has covered, from start to finish, the entirety of World War I, done an album about famous last stands throughout history and all sorts of other subjects. And when I listen to the album, I look up what each song is about online and read through the actual history.
The music makes these events and people come alive again and that makes learning about them so interesting.
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That’s amazing, Jay. I had no idea!
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And just think, I haven’t even listened to all of their albums yet since I was a latecomer to the band. They played a concert in Brazil and had one of the surviving Smoking Snakes come up on stage with them. They’ve done a song about that celebrates the Marine Corps called “Devil Dogs”. Even a song about Audie Murphy but not about his war time heroics, but what happened with him AFTERWARDS. It’s both entertaining and fascinating.
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Also, in the last two books in James R. Benn’s Billy Boyle World War II mystery series he’s mentioned or featured people or groups that I first learned about through the Sabaton music. I was so excited that I wrote to him on FB and sent him links to the songs.
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That is absolutely fascinating, Jay! I had no idea there was so much history connected to Iron Maiden! I suppose their name gives a bit of a hint come to think of it!
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Jessie,
Yes Iron Maiden has plenty of history based songs in their catalog. “Aces High”, “Flight of Icarus” and so many more.
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I loved this post from the beautiful, celebratory purple graphic at the start. Great fun!
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Thanks so much!
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It would probably have to be AP Chemistry my junior year of high school. Unbeknownst to me, I didn’t qualify for the class because I hadn’t taking trig or pre-calculous. The math proofs nearly killed me. But the teacher was so wonderful I persevered and got an A in the class and a 4 on the AP exam.
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Wow! I am impressed!
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