It was going to haunt me till the day I died. Not remembering that teacher's name-possibly my favorite teacher in four years of undergrad-might not cause me to lose sleep, but it would cause me to reexamine my past. His work has even been plagiarized, as explained on this page. Most impressive. As I was going through the mess on the floor, I decided to get organized. I would throw the notebooks in stacks according to the year I took that class. I rapidly formed four stacks. Soon all notebooks were separated. While I did finally find stuff from my senior year, the one class that was missing was that damn English 103 class. Not a trace of it. Well, what now? My thoughts were even turning to contacting the university to see if they could provide me with the name of the teacher. But, wait. I saw one last bundle on the other side of the room, but I was sure I had already gone through it. In fact, I had started in that area days before. I didn't see a notebook. There was a binder there. I opened up the binder, and there it was! It really does scare me how much I have forgotten. I don't remember using a binder for any class at UI, much less that one, my last semester there. Maybe it was required by the teacher. I haven't gone through the materials yet to know. (after further research, yeah, it was required).
My next obstacle was the teacher's name. Yeah, maybe you already guessed-all the paperwork from the class only had his last name. The only thing I remembered was that it was a common first name. David? John? Argh. Well, off to the handy UI alumni database again. A search quickly revealed a Thurston who got his PHD in 1995 in English. MICHAEL! That was it.
So I had the name. Time for some detective work. Luckily, detective work had become much easier between the time of the fictional Sherlock Holmes and the 21st century. A google search usually suffices. So, I googled the name. Well, this page (scroll down to Michael Thurston's entry) gives a quick bio. Jumping right into teaching at Yale-now that is impressive. I would think that his move to Smith College was actually an upgrade, though I question the merits of a liberal arts school that restricts its student population to one gender. Regardless, Smith is very prestigious, and, I expect, very expensive.
What all this means is that I was correct in thinking that Mr. Thurston would have attained an impressive status in life in the years between my time as his student and today. My curiosity being satisfied in this area, I can now move on to the other mysteries introduced by my old school books, such as why I have Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance when I do not remember reading it or even being assigned it in any class. The excitement never ends!
