First-year University of Lethbridge student Joel Wegner jumped at the chance to take Dr. Kevin McGeough’s (BA ’96) Hebrew classes because he knew they weren’t offered every year.
As a history major with his eye on an education degree, he thought knowing Hebrew words and grammar could come in handy in studying ancient documentation.
“I also took it because I thought it was going to be interesting,” Wegner says. “And when else am I going to get a chance to learn ancient Hebrew?”
Like all classes, Hebrew had several assignments, some of which were translations.
“It just so happened that for the first three weeks of doing assignments, I didn’t have a standard-size notebook,” he says. “Each of them was written on different sizes of paper.”
For one assignment, Wegner submitted his translation on cue cards because that’s all he had available.
“After like three assignments, Professor Kevin mentioned that I’d just been handing in my assignments always on a different size of paper,” he says. “And then the idea kind of got in my head — I wonder how far I can push this. If he had said stop at any point, I would have, absolutely. But he kept receiving it quite well, and it started to be a bit entertaining for my classmates.”
Wegner started to think about the possibilities of handing in his assignments in other materials.
“It was all pretty funny, maybe also quite annoying, but since he was getting everything right, I didn’t want to get in the way,” says McGeough. “I think the moral of the story is that you need to be specific with your class syllabi. Joel pointed out to me that I didn’t actually say anywhere that the homework had to be printed on paper.”
Wegner got pretty creative with the mediums he used for assignments — sometimes it was whatever was handy — a Subway cup, a paper bag or the inside of a box of microwaveable popcorn. Sometimes it took a little planning — like when he wrote his assignment on an old T-shirt, on a wooden board and when he etched his assignment on an empty glass peanut butter jar.
“As a first year, I’m still learning how to balance my procrastination tendencies and my focusing,” Wegner says. “It was both really entertaining for me and a useful way of getting myself to do it.”
Needing a little motivation is perhaps understandable, given that much of the goal of learning ancient Hebrew is to read the Old Testament and learn a new vocabulary.
“In any case, the other students loved it, and my office neighbours loved seeing what he’d submit and what kind of a pain it would be to mark. My daughter thought he was heroic,” says McGeough.