What not to write on a teaching fellowship application

My greatest goal in teaching is the complete and utter ruination of the academic potential, personal virtues and life goals of each and every student unfortunate enough to enter my classroom. Uninhibited by moral scruples and bolstered by the time-honored philosophy that no good deed should go unpunished, I have achieved an astounding rate of success in my previous teaching positions and intend to continue my reign of classroom terror whether it be in your miserable scholarship program or elsewhere.

In my time abroad spent in China, I engaged in tutoring and teaching English as a second language, or perhaps I should say English as a defamatory art form. My method was to prepare my unwitting Chinese students with a host of the choicest English expletives and obscenities described to them as translations of cordial greetings, parlor pleasantries and business terminology. I rest assured that the future of their interactions with visiting Anglophones will be reduced to hilarity, derision and warfare.

My pedagogical stratagems are not confined to ESL, however; you will find me quite adept at obscuring and perverting any given subject. In mathematics, I have timed tests with no calculators using the messiest possible fractions and decimals, with final questions involving imaginary numbers. In English, my students' returned papers resemble bandages used on a hemorrhage, with a maze of crisscrossing red comments in illegible cursive which they later discover to be written in Sanskrit except for the large printed D- on the back. In the hard sciences, I proceed directly to advanced physics, assign quantum mechanics problems for homework and demonstrate the inevitability of our obliteration by the Sun going supernova, assuming we don't destroy all life with nuclear power, or simply pollute our planet into the equivalent of a greenhouse used as a junk storage shed and a public bathroom filled with carbon monoxide. History and the social sciences happen to be my favorite area in which to quash optimism, progressive values and the desire for further knowledge, simply because postmodernism affords such a brilliant method for reducing all reasonable assertions to relativist drivel. I have not yet taught an art class, but the work of Marcel Duchamp leaves me confident that there is ample opportunity for confounding young talent.

When it comes to classroom discipline, I rule with an iron fist. Although the banning of corporal punishment in recent years is a lamentable step backwards in my opinion, it has opened the doors to a host of psychological approaches borrowed from the offshore containment facilities run by the U.S. military. When these methods do not suffice to keep students from displaying moments of academic perspicuity, I must resort to fine-tuning the latent equalizing pressures of adolescent society. On one occasion, a student offering the correct answer in class was immediately pelted with lunch refuse by his peers, who had become sufficiently inured to my influence that they recognized the need to take him down a notch.

In conclusion, I believe I am the ideal candidate for ensuring chaos and demoralization in America's classrooms, continuing in the grand tradition of Leave Every Child (with a sore) Behind. I can affirm that I possess the personality traits of the ideal teacher, including belligerence, orneriness, intolerance, cruelty and impatience. My view on education can be summed up by saying, "There is no bright student who can't be turned around by a motivated teacher, and no bad student who can't be driven further into the muck by that same individual." If you have any further questions regarding my qualifications, you can dunk your head in pickle brine because I don't have time for your nonsense.

—Jeff McCreight '08