The Hot Sheet

Pockets and Proofs
The Math Department spoofed the national Poem in Your Pocket Day with Proof in Your Pocket Protector Day. A clothesline on Middle Path offered pocket protectors and “proofs” for the taking. Inner nerds across campus rejoiced.

Poetic Discounts
The bookstore celebrated Poem in Your Pocket Day by offering a 20 percent discount on books of poetry to anyone who recited a poem at the register. For a haiku, that’s a per-syllable savings of more than 1 percent.

Great Teaching
Nine Kenyon professors are included in the Princeton Review’s book The Best 300 Professors. They were selected from about 42,000 professors using a student survey and results gleaned from RateMyProfessors.com. Kenyon’s roll call tops each of the Ivy League schools mentioned. Leading Kenyon in the best-prof count were Mount Holyoke College (fourteen), James Madison University (eleven), Colgate (ten), and the College of William and Mary (ten).

Studious Students
Kenyon students work hard, at least comparatively speaking. Drawing on data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, the Washington Post noted Kenyon as one of five institutions where students spend ample time studying. The Post reported that there is a generational decline in the number of hours college students study, but that at Kenyon first-year students study nineteen hours a week and seniors twenty-one hours.

Bingeing on the Bard
Last April, continuing a springtime tradition, students held a marathon Shakespeare reading, reciting nine plays over twenty-four hours, with sonnets in between. The event was advertised with posters bearing a picture of the Bard and slogans like “Everyone else is square, I am pentameter,” “I was before Hamlet ever considered being,” and “My favorite sonnet is 69.”  

Serfs Rising
The Kenyon men’s Ultimate Frisbee team, called the SERF, traveled to Wisconsin to compete in the national Division III championship—scheduled, alas, during Commencement Weekend. Some seniors chose to stick with the team rather than march across the stage. Kenyon placed eleventh out of fifteen teams, but the seniors went home with a B.A.

Extinct Phones
Because hardly anybody in the residence halls uses room phones anymore—everyone has a cell phone—the College removed them. But public phones are a necessity. So authorities brought back an institution from the era before pervasive personal electronics: hall phones.

Fresh-Brewed Metaphors
This year, themed housing at Kenyon includes “Creative Writing/Coffeehouse,” based in one of the new North Campus apartments. The Collegian reported that the goal is to provide a “non-judgmental safe zone where budding artists can share their writing.” When did coffee and writing become judgmental and unsafe?

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