Uh Oh! That Kid Just Made a Good Point for Once

By Noah Goodman

May 25, 2018

THURSDAY 2:00 pm — It appeared to be a typical day in Professor Jones’s section of Self, Culture, and Society. Half the class hadn’t done their reading, Fanon’s status as a Marxist was being discussed, and first-year Christopher Kerber, resident That Kid, was partaking in his patent prolonged patterings. That is, until 2:42, about halfway through the discussion section, when the Shady Dealer received a report that Mr. Kerber had apparently said something that was actually kind of insightful for once. According to one of our sources in Professor Jones’s section, who will remain anonymous, following the professor posing a question that was rather obviously meant to be rhetorical, Kerber began to “answer” it, eliciting a slightly less than audible sigh from the class. What followed, though, thoroughly surprised everyone present: instead of positing some inscrutable “meta-theory” only tangentially related to the topic at hand or “just playing devil’s advocate”, Kerber uttered a sequence of words that, for once in the entire history of Spring Quarter 2018, Section 34 of Self, Culture, and Society, didn’t consist entirely of metaphysical blather and was only a little bit conceited.
This reporter was certainly shocked upon hearing of this groundbreaking event in the development of this particular SOSC section, but the people that were most affected by this completely revolutionary change of conduct coming from Mr. Kerber were his very own classmates. When we asked second-year Jessica Schmidt what she thought about Kerber’s comment, she replied, “Which one?” And when we asked first-year Skyler Weiermyer whether he thought this was a turning point for his SOSC class, he said, “Sorry, I was looking for the page we’re on. Can you repeat the question?”

These powerful student testimonies definitely speak for themselves, but if anything is certain, it is that Section 34 has a bright future ahead of it. Of course, while this does not necessarily mean that change will come quickly or that Kerber’s action signals a permanent shift in his modus operandi, it does suggest a certain fact that will be pivotal to positive future change: namely, that Kerber is physically capable of formulating and expressing ideas that have some element of merit. While analysts long suspected this to be the case, the presence of concrete evidence is a significant step forward and opens up many possibilities down the line. All that can be done now, however, is to watch Kerber closely and hope that he makes a few more comments that are actually not that bad.