School and Education

10 signs your college English teacher used to work at Ice Capades

It won’t take you long to determine your college English teacher has a figure skating past.

  1. Skating Syntax: Whenever they delve into the intricacies of sentence structure, they glide across the classroom with the elegance of a swan, each step mimicking the rhythm of iambic pentameter, culminating in a graceful pirouette that leaves a trail of imaginary ice crystals in the air.
  2. Frosty Feedback: Your essays don’t just come back with red ink. Instead, they’re adorned with shimmering snowflake stickers, each intricately designed and sparkling as if they’ve captured the very essence of a winter’s morning.
  3. Chilly Classroom: The room always feels like a winter wonderland. Even in the heat of summer, a cold breeze seems to waft through, and you swear you can hear the distant echo of skates carving into ice every time the wind howls.
  4. Literary Lutz: When they passionately dissect a thrilling plot twist in a classic novel, their excitement manifests in a series of intricate footwork patterns, reminiscent of a figure skater’s routine, culminating in a double axel that leaves the class in awe.
  5. Penguin Poetry: Their lessons on poetry always have a frosty twist. They speak of verses as if they were snowflakes, unique and delicate, and their favorite poems always paint vivid images of icy landscapes and playful penguins waddling under the aurora borealis.
  6. Icy Idioms: Their lectures are peppered with chilly phrases. “Skating on thin ice” isn’t just a warning; it’s accompanied by tales of narrow escapes on frozen ponds, where the ice crackled ominously underfoot, threatening to plunge one into the icy depths below.
  7. Sequined Style: Their attire is a spectacle in itself. Even on casual Fridays, there’s always a hint of their icy past—a sequined tie, a scarf that shimmers like fresh snow under moonlight, or shoes that click rhythmically, echoing the sound of skates on a frozen surface.
  8. Blade Bookmarks: Their cherished literature anthologies are marked not with regular bookmarks, but with slender, gleaming skate blades, each engraved with dates and names of past performances, a testament to a life once lived on ice.
  9. Frozen Footnotes: Every lecture is a journey through literature and ice. References aren’t just academic; they’re personal anecdotes, tales of famous skaters they’ve met, or memories of that one Ice Capades performance where the spotlight shone just a tad brighter.
  10. Cool Quizzes: Exams are a blend of literary questions and figure skating trivia. The bonus question might ask about the symbolism in “Moby Dick,” but it’s followed by a query about the origin of the triple Salchow, complete with diagrams of the perfect form.

Joe Ditzel

Joe Ditzel is a keynote speaker, humor writer, and really bad golfer. You can reach him via email at [email protected] as well as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.