In my years of teaching a University Jazz History class, I asked students, at the end of the semester to write an extra credit thesis paper. The subject was simply, “What did I learn about Jazz over the semester?” I concluded that this would be a good way to find out what the students learned (and didn’t learn) so I could adjust my future lectures and assignments appropriately.
An unexpected bi-product of this paper was the discovery of unintentional humorous remarks ranging from grammatical errors to gross misinterpretations of the material presented in the lectures, text, and videos.
Some students had admitted to rarely attending class, and in an effort to get a grade-boost with this extra credit, took their poor notes as a source to write a “last minute” essay. Many of these essays are written, “Stream of conscious” without proofreading or editing. There seemed to be a mix of apathy and ignorance in their writing. As an optimist, I prefer to think that apathy was the bigger problem.
It’s important to note that this class was made up of 160+ non-music major students who were advised to take this class as a “blow-off”. Most of the papers were well-written or at least adequate. There were only a small percentage of unacceptable essays with egregious errors. Even the best papers, however, periodically had a cute or funny quote.
In these pages, there is material that may be deemed offensive. These are exact quotes from student essays, and in no way, represent my own thoughts and opinions.
This is a small representative sample of a large list of quotes. They are property of Scott Gwinnell and WSG Music. If you are interested in purchasing them for publication, please email me. Please do not download or copy this list.
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