When Mike Bradley ’21 saw the “Weekender” ad for the “Student Versus Teacher Olympics,” a flood of pure emotion poured into his brain for the first time since his Zumba-induced concussion. Strutting into his favorite Quadrangle wearing a Bruins sweatshirt and his middle school’s finest “New Boxburn Dragons” backwards baseball cap, Bradley cast his eyes upon his competition: The Faculty.
The team’s aggressive competitors include boxing legend Ms. Hamstra (the Math-550 teacher always wearing a sequin denim jacket, thick metal belt buckle, and who has a classroom that smells just vaguely of soup), speed-skating extraordinaire Mr. Kantor (the French-200 teacher who breathes heavy, only wears beige, and couldn’t figure out how to connect to Apple TV if his life depended on it), and underwater-basket-weaving superstar Mrs. Dahnson (the English-100 teacher with dangerously long hair and a floor-length handmade skirt who sees no problem with assigning a little more than 45 minutes of homework and “doesn’t understand why students care about grades”).
With excitement and stale pumpkin spice in the air, the games began! First: a friendly game of dodgeball in which all the male teachers wore shorts that left no room for imagination. Spectators of the event watched as Mr. Merrimack and Mrs. Lovin each pulled their respective hammies rushing to save a stray ball. The game also displayed an amazing save by football Tim Thumper PG ’19, who swatted the ball moments before it smashed into the faces of onlooking fac-brats.
Next was an endurance race, where students raced teachers to see who could reply the slowest to an email. Another favorite event was the Pasta Monday sauce-identifying contest. Another still was the “Oh, crap, I missed my alarm” sprint from Abbot to Bulfinch Hall. The final event and tiebreaker was the dreaded, “Oh god, is that paper due today?” contest, in which contestants have 75 minutes to draft what will inevitably get them a 4 — at best. Of the feared event, Barack Lee ’20 said, “Whatever, I’m just gonna outsource it.”
When asked how he practiced for the Olympic events, Mr. Jarcan, Instructor in Computer Science, said, “I try and be as unclear as possible to my students about the expectations of the course. That way, they are so worn out and beaten down by the time the Olympics come, all I have to do is black bag their caffeine pills, and they won’t even remember to show up.”
The truth is, like every year, there were no winners, because Winter Term is on the rise and no amount of petty victories against the teachers will ever, ever numb that pain. Cool is the winter, but cold are my veins.
