Charlton Heston Was On My Exam

The last post is not the best thing in the world to leave up for so long, but I've been too busy to worry about it. Graduate School applications, Fellowship applications, Teaching Associate applications, job applications and midterms.

Ah, the joys of midterms. In my history of Hebrew class we had a take home exam. When I found this out at the beginning of the quarter, I was pretty excited. What could be easier than a take home exam? Then I saw the first question. Here are the exact instructions:

Exhaust me by thoroughly discussing everything you know about the following words:

Let me just say there is nothing more nerve wracking than that kind of open ended question on an exam. If I'm exhausted by writing the essay, does that mean that the professor will be exhausted when he reads it? If you've never met this man, he's the kind of guy that couldn't be exhausted by anything. I haven't found one thing he's not excited about. This means that he's really great to be around, but it also means that if he's using his exhaustion to gauge the quality of those essays, I just hope he's reading them at 3 am . . . on a treadmill.

And, once again, I get to lament my geekiness, because although the exam took all weekend to complete, I actually ended up enjoying it.

My favorite part--analyzing the Hebrew on the stone tablets for the movie, The Ten Commandments. Yes, that is real Hebrew. Charlton Heston--who incidentally played every ancient Jewish character in the movies of the 1960's--was actually carrying fake stone tablets with authentic ancient Hebrew on it. Well, not that authentic--the script was a few hundred years off. Fools.