Michael & Liz are Bloggable

Liz dug this up while cleaning a week or two ago. It's a textbook from a Geography class in college, but it's no normal textbook. Let's first say that the teacher of this class, Jon Boyer, is the highest rated teacher at Virginia Tech (Check out the link, it's his page on RateVTTeachers. If you look at the "best" section on the left, he's at the top). The dude is amazing. I took the class when I was a sophomore and Liz took it when she was a senior. He was hilarious and engaging and made you actually want to go to class. He taught the class in a massive auditorium of 500 students and the room filled up every time. I actually went to his class once when Liz was a student, he's that cool. Some students wait years to be able to get into his class because it's that one class that EVERYONE HAS to take. He used ways of teaching that made you remember what he was talking about. When teaching about the middle east, he threw quarts of oil into the crowd. I remember one day he was talking about meat production in some country, and he started throwing McDonald's Hamburgers at the students.

During Liz's year, he had a semester long tic-tac-toe type game where each square was a face of a very old and decrepit leader from around the world. If by the end of the semester there were 3 X's in a row, denoting the leader's death, then everyone got A's. It never happened, obviously, but it certainly made you pay attention to who those people were and to see how their health was. It was right around the time Fidel Castro left office due to illness, you can bet there were a lot of very anxious VT students around that time.

Anyway, Jon Boyer is awesome. So in between the time I took his class and the time Liz took his class, he wrote this book called the Plaid Avenger's World. That's actually him on the front. It's a geography book written for real people using real language (yes, he even cusses in it). You can't read a page or two without laughing once or twice at what he has to say about the material he's teaching. It's genuinely funny and informative stuff.  Here's a couple random excerpts from the first few pages:

"Africa, largely believed to be overpopulated, is a huge-ass place, but with half the people totals of South Asia or East Asia."

"The Demographic Transition is a lovely little model that goes a long way in explaining lots of things about human population change around the world today. Be forewarned: it is just a theory, but damned if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense when applied to just about anywhere, just about anytime."

So here we've held onto this book thinking it was a keepsake that we'd have to remember one of our favorite classes. But who are we kidding, we're not going to go back and read through this book. All I have from the class is what is in my memory and that's good enough for me. So the Plaid Avenger traveled all around the world, and found himself in the ditch pile.