Somehow, it seems fitting that my most significant moments of brazen student absurdity would happen in public speaking classes. The incident in the following paragraphs takes place for fifteen minutes in one class. I dare say that the three incidents all happened consecutively because they are all I remember from that day.

These students were preparing for a visual aid speech. They were required to present information on a topic and give the audience some representations of the ideas they were discussing. A straightforward example would be a speech on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You could bring in the ingredients and demonstrate the process for the class in that speech. There is nothing too complicated about it. Just practice and knock it out when it is time to present. However, some people have difficulty coming up with ideas, and what they do concoct can be scary. This story is about three students who fall into this category.

The first student approached me with a plan to present her collection of knives. She had tons of them and wanted to talk about some of the different types she owned. I calmly declined her proposal because even Remus has enough common sense to forbid people from carrying knives on a college campus. It would be a violation of campus safety. That is simply a commonsense call to deny such a speech from happening. She protested but eventually came up with another topic with fewer sharp edges.

The second student decided to ramp up the nonsense by wanting to present a speech about cheating in relationships. Furthermore, she insisted on using a young man and the three women he deceived as the visual aids. I turned her proposal down almost as fast as the knife speech. My only hesitation came via a quick flash of how the situation would unfold in the class. I could see the classroom devolving into a daytime television talk show set where the audience was horrified and applauding simultaneously. I cannot imagine how somebody would even prepare such a speech. How do you convince four people to come into a classroom and have their dirty laundry displayed for everyone? What would go through the young man’s mind, besides a blunt object to the back of his skull, that he would willingly come forward to admit he was involved with three women simultaneously? Aside from bragging rights, what is the incentive to do any of this?

Knowing somebody else was with your lover in your absence, you probably did not handle the deceit very well. Additionally, what young lady would be copacetic with letting people know that her relationship was not completely honest? Would the three ladies be fine sitting in the same room together, or would it quickly turn into a riot scene? All these thoughts ran through my head when I contemplated the proposal for a millisecond. I refused to entertain this idea any further, but the student insisted that she could easily bring in the people and that they would be on their best behavior. I am usually willing to meet students halfway on some of their proposals, but this idea needed scrapping before calamity would ensue. Besides, I don’t feel like breaking up a fistfight. Nowhere in my resume does it say I served as a hockey referee or bouncer.

After convincing the talk show host that her speech was a bad idea, I moved on to my third brain-dead suggestion of the class. The proposal started simply enough as a young man wanted to give a speech about his best friend. That seems logical. Usually, I’m not too fond of speeches involving human beings as visual aids, but they can be helpful. Except for that last speech proposal, I don’t need visual aids that can cuss out other visual aids. However, the topic of this student’s speech was his dead friend. Okay, this student wants to do a bit of a tribute for his deceased buddy. I am okay with everything so far. It sounds like he wants to give a tribute to his friend; I can understand his motivation. Then, the proposal took a turn I was not anticipating. The student claimed he would use his friend’s urn as the visual aid. Mortified, I immediately denied his presentation. He begged permission to give the speech; he even admitted to having the urn sitting in his dorm room.

My mind started racing. All I could think of was that there were human remains somewhere on campus not stored by the biology department. Questions were swirling in my head about what insane situation I had just entered. Why are there human remains in a dorm room right now? I can almost bet that the urn is sitting next to this student’s unopened textbooks and dirty laundry. The only thing worse than that would be if somebody came into his room completely drunk and spilled his friend out onto the floor. Most dorm rooms are disgusting, and now there is a possibility that human ashes are floating in the air after such an unfortunate accident. It would be better than breathing in the mold that most dorms had. My biggest question was, where is the family of the deceased? Did they allow this student to take the ashes to school? If so, why? I am pretty sure it is illegal in some capacity to have human remains in the dorms. Is the roommate cool with this?

I didn’t care. I shut down the conversation before the student could further explain himself. The less I knew about the situation, the better off I would be. I told him to pick any other topic or bring pictures of his friend. But whatever he chose to do, I begged him not to bring an urn to my classroom. It was too morbid for me to handle. After class ended, I moped back to my office and reconsidered my life choices. Usually, I only have one wacky speech proposal. In five minutes, I had three lunatics ask me to give either illegal, immoral, or ill-advised speeches.