A Legacy

So, in some way if we are lucky we will be remembered for something. Some people might become the best basketball player of their time and be showered with millions and be adored by millions. Others might happen to be the best paper clip repurposer in the world and not even know they have a skill set unmatched in the globe.

Well I am neither of those. But I have created a strange legacy that is particular to the University of Alabama.

First of all, there is a friend of mine who should be by now a freaking icon of the University of Alabama history department. He is Dr. John Beeler. To know him is to know the wondrous sound of raucous laughter. His is an extremely kind-hearted man. I love many things about him, but one of my favorite aspects about him is how he manifests his socialist leanings. He goes out whenever he can and pops some tags. He goes thrift shoppin’. When it isn’t to scour the shelves for the one or two allbums that he still doesn’t own (I helped him move at least once and there were a few common items and truckloads of albums, turntables and parts for turntables), it is to by shirts of the working man. To fall in Beeler’s collection a shirt needs to be the button down, work logo (think Gus’s Garage) variety AND it needs an employee name. Beeler must have over a hundred of these shirts by now, and they are awesome. It is cool to have a thing.

My talent, it seems is to make gag answers for multiple choice questions. I started doing this with Beeler and he has kept it up ever since.

http://www.cw.ua.edu/article/2016/04/local-qa-britpop

It wasn’t in this article but I can’t find it, I even once got a shout out.

So today out of the blue he connected with me and caught be up to date with his goings on and shared a new batch of test questions.

My “brand” started with a gag answer that randomly asserted that the answer was “a man in a cave North of Geneva.” For whatever reason, that guy has become a standard on Beeler tests.

For the record, he was created in 1993, 25 years ago.

I am so fortunate to have learned from Beeler about how to teach and how to interact with Beeler. I hope many of you had crossed paths with him somewhere along the lines.

He are the surviving questions that he sent me that I wrote 25 years ago or so and were on a test in Tuscaloosa this week.

____ Montesquieu

a. admired the checks and balances created by the separation of powers in the English constitution.

b. was the chief minister to Louis XIII, who created absolutism in France.

c. was the grand Virginia estate designed by Thomas Jefferson. Its shape was ideally suited for its location on the tail side of a nickel.

d. advanced the field of medicine with his research on the circulation of the blood in the human body.

e. organized a revolt of the Russian nobility in order to bring Catherine the Great to power.

_____ Under the theory of mercantilism

a. free trade leads to the accumulation of wealth and, by ending economic competition, will eliminate the major cause of war.

b. overseas possessions are seen as burdensome because of the high administrative costs of maintaining them.

c. the nations of the world compete for a fixed amount of wealth, enriching themselves at the expense of other countries.

d. all trade goods must be inspected by a man in a cave north of Geneva.

e. manufactured products are inherently more valuable than raw materials