- Start talking about your plentiful and varied career choices, and then bring up the large sums you will make. Ask them about their future. Show them the average salaries of 14-year-olds who work in Burger King so that they can see the similarities.
- Give them “a piece of writing” and tell them to thoroughly analyze the style, structure, narrative voice, themes, and overall effect. When this is done, kindly explain that what you just gave them was the Spanish version of the warnings inside a roll of duct tape.
- Go online and send them an instant message that says “I is god” and then sign off before they get a chance to correct your grammar or explain in 507 pages (with an ever-evolving thesis) why you can’t be god because that role is already inhabited by Shakespeare, Twain, Hemingway, Joyce, or Salinger – whomsoever happens to be their preference.
- Write down two short, preferable casually connected, ideas in sentence form. Erase the period between the two sentences, don’t capitalize the first letter in the second sentence, and then connect the two thoughts using a COLON.
- Spend twenty minutes or more attempting to convince them that The Great Gatsby is actually the greatest book ever written despite the fact that Fitzgerald is the most overrated writer in the course of history (well, at least second only to Hawthorne), and that the characters are all obnoxiously unlikable, the themes clichéd, and the symbolism atrocious. Include as part of your argument that the fact that all high school students nation- and world-wide read and thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Then stand on your head.
- Tell them that dictionaries (the real kind, not the internet ones) are merely a result of a highly contained government conspiracy to alter the vocabulary of American citizens that was halted because the government realized that no one actually used them.
- Tell them that their interpretation of feminism in Jane Eyre was decent, but the one written by the physics major in the second row was significantly better.
- Walk up to them and say, “This ignominy makes me feel esoteric!!!” Shake them a few times to ensure that they’ve gotten the point.
- Using a computer science major, hack into the English major’s many email accounts and unsubscribe from all internet “Word of the Day” calendars.
- Inform them that in a Pythagorean triangle, with side a, b, and c, with c being the hypotenuse, a2 + b2 will essentially always be equal to c2 no matter what tense it’s written in or what diction you use, and there is NO implied metaphor.
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