January 21, 2000

Fake English Teacher Declared Hoax


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By BEN DOVER

English students around Menlo School were shocked, shocked at yesterday's news from Vicky's Writing Center regarding the authenticity of Ms. Vicky Greenbaum. According to sources from the Nerdery of Mr. Thibodeaux's room, several marauding students of Russell Kubiak had persuaded the two English teachers to trade places for the day.

"It's surprising news," explained Herr Doktor Professor Rudolf von Hacklheber, head professor of Data Scrambling and author of Riemann: Zeta, Schmeta, Transmeta! "All these years we thought that of the two teachers, at least Vicky was sane. Now we know that they have both lost their minds."

Exclaimed Jacqueline Lew of Vicky's Modern Writers seminar, "EEK! It's Kubiak! What POOCHUNKS!" at this sight of the lecherous devil. Meanwhile, Marc Khuri-Yakub of the same English class ran around the room, screaming "BADGERS! BADGERS!", invoking the umbrage of Mr. Kubiak: "SHUT UP OR I'LL DEFENESTRATE YOU!" Concurrently, Eric Robinson ran around the room, shouting "The Witch Costume! Where is the Witch Costume?!"

On the other side of campus, students were relieved to discover that the evil maniac had vanished in a puff of smoke and been replaced by a somewhat nicer teacher. "Kubiak told us that 94% of the class would get a C-- this runs against every tenet of Menlo Grade Inflation!" complained senior Philip Zeyliger. "But," interjected Brian Marson, "as long as you don't call Vicky by her last name and do the work, she won't damn you to the hell of D land."

According to an e-mail from Darrick Wong to Philip Zeyliger, the plot to have the two teachers switch places was hatched shortly after the first semester English exam. "Let's have Vicky and Kubiak switch places for a few days just to drive everybody crazy. It'll be fun!" wrote Darrick. "Oooh, fun." replied Philip.

Apparently, the two students were implicated in earlier attempts to torture English students all over the campus. We also noted that those two students, who are second semester seniors, appeared to be somewhat bored during Mr. Thibodeaux's AP Computer Science class, and are therefore statistically prone to formulating pranks of this order.

Steve Davidson, head librarian of Menlo School, informed reporters that he had caught Darrick Wong printing "Ten Percent Club Cards" earlier in the day: "Yesterday, I saw him printing out these rectangular things that looked like ten dollar bills. I asked him what he was up to, but he just grinned and walked away."

We asked economist Richard Gill to comment on this strange phenomenon of English teachers switching places at Menlo school. Said Mr. Gill: "This has absolutely no effect on supply or demand. However, this is the quintessential double-edged sword.

"For people in Vicky's class, the marginal cost of having a suspected murderer doling out grades far exceeds the marginal benefits. For Mr. Kubiak's students, however, the marginal benefit of having Vicky for a day far outweighs the marginal cost of closely analyzing juxtapositional dichotomies.

"But we must not stop there. We must also analyze the social aspects of this case. The marginal social benefit of having Mr. Kubiak still roaming the streets stays far above the marginal social cost of locking him in a dungeon forever and throwing away the key."

Around school, there was a mixed reaction to the teacher switch. "I asked Mr. Kubiak about the distribution of grades in his College Writing class. He responded by drawing a bell curve, drawing C, B and A levels, and then explaining that a full 95% of the class would not fare better than a C. I'm so relieved," said Catherine Spence.

In the cafeteria, we asked some juniors about the teacher switch. However, it was rather difficult to question these students in any depth; generally, they refused to cooperate, citing unforeseen stomach ailments. However, Anya Dolganov, a student in one of Mr. Kubiak's AP classes, remarked, "Oh, he's gone. Good! I leave for two days and this...this deranged lunatic passes out a ton of handouts just to make me fall behind." Victor Mezhvinsky disagreed, saying "Kubifat? I think that Vicky's is a much better class. At least Vicky won't try to strangle you!"

Whatever the cause of this strange interactions between teachers, one thing is sure: Moo! This article is completely spoofed. The New York Times would never print an article of this caliber; it is so far off that we didn't even hit the haystack that the target is pinned to! Misquoting runs rampant through this article; none of the perpetrators people in this article ever said anything of the sort...

Except maybe Jaci. Oooh, I'm going to get in so much trouble for this article! However, early indications are that the stock market does not consider this teacher switch to be any major event. Although the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly sixty points at 11:15am, Mr. Sam Lepler of Charles Schwab said "These market fluctuations are nothing. The Dow is over 11,000; sixty points is not that much.

"Such things are normal, with all these dot-coms "refocusing" to perhaps get a little more out of the red." Sources say that the Fed is not expected to raise interest rates as a result of this little conundrum because Alan Greenspan appeared to be in a friendly mood and even waved at the people in one of Donald Trump's adjoining super skyscrapers.


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