Ringo Parquet, Tuba Instructor
A local university was creating a pool of applicants for the position of adjunct instructor of Introduction to Tuba, and as he happened to be in the market for a job, Ringo Parquet decided to hop on in. All in all, the biggest thing he had working against him was that he didn’t know how to play the tuba.
Ringo, however, did not necessarily consider that a dealbreaker. “After all,” he reminded himself, “those who can’t do, teach.” And indeed, it was hard to imagine anything Ringo Parquet could not do more than playing the tuba, because when I say he didn’t know how to play the tuba, I mean he really had no idea whatsoever how to play the tuba. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he’d ever seen a tuba in person — or, he supposed he should say, “in tuba.”
On top of that, Ringo figured it stood to reason that if the students he was applying to teach were enrolling in Introduction to Tuba, they, too, didn’t know a damn thing about playing the tuba, meaning he could tell them whatever he wanted, and they’d have no basis for judging whether or not he was full of shit. For instance, he could tell them: “First, fill the tuba with peanut butter, and then pour in the jam.” On second thought, that probably wouldn’t go over too well, especially considering the price of peanut butter these days. Luckily, Ringo was pretty confident he wasn’t going to get hired seeing as the only qualification he could think to list on his resume was “fluent in English.”
Well, maybe the hiring committee assumed he’d accidentally omitted “played tuba,” or maybe there simply weren’t enough experienced tuba players in the area looking to get into the adjunct instructing business for them to split hairs, but one way or another, Ringo ended up getting the job.
“Congratulations,” said the chair of the hiring committee when he phoned Ringo with the news.
“Thanks,” replied Ringo.
Then he got straight down to the business of drawing up some class plans.
The first class was a breeze, as Ringo quickly realized he could easily kill off the entire fifty-minutes by reading through the syllabus and conducting an ice breaker. The specific ice breaker he created for the purpose involved tossing a large beach ball around the classroom on which various questions of a personal nature had been written and requiring each student, when they caught it, to answer the question nearest their left thumb. Questions on the ball included: “If you were stranded on a desert island for several weeks and could only have one thing, would you rather have a pair of sneakers, a tube of sunscreen, or a goat?”; “If you picked the goat, would you fuck it?”; and, “If you fucked it, would you still slaughter it and eat its meat if that’s what it took to survive?”
As for what Ringo had planned for the second class, suffice it to say that if it hadn’t been for that overly sensitive goat in the third row who reported him to the administration for asking inappropriate ice breaker questions, we might have gotten the chance to find out.
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