By: Campus Correspondent
Everything began as normally as could be expected when walking into a classroom led by Professor Hades Hopper. He was dressed in a full black goat/minotaur-style costume, complete with a skull mask, dramatically waving around a smoking skull-shaped incense burner, while chanting under his breath. He began the lesson professionally enough, giving a highly theatrical and sexually charged description of the primordial creation myth, revolving around Gaia and Uranus.
The dad jokes were flying as Professor Hades casually passed around a plate of ‘magic mushrooms’, which he at least didn’t hide the true nature of, and encouraged students to ‘take one and pass it around’ for a ‘fun ride’ to better understand the divine creation story. Most students wisely passed on the plate, knowing better than to partake of such things. The majority of students seemed visibly shocked and were openly warning others against consuming anything handed out by the eccentric professor.
Unfortunately, not everyone heeded the warning. A boy with a British accent accepted and ate the mushroom, and then minutes later he suddenly leaped up shouting about a train smashing through the classroom wall, followed by hordes of horned demons armed with axes and daggers who were invading the room. In his hallucinated panic, he began physically fighting the empty air, throwing punches, kicking desks, and knocking over chairs regardless if people were sitting in them or not. All the while, he warned that the ‘demons’ were attacking the class.
Rather than help calm the situation down, the professor in fact made things worse by cutting his own palm with a dagger and smearing blood along the classroom walls and door frame. This was done in order to “ward off the demons” and protect the students from an impending “demonic war.”
The classroom descended into utter pandemonium as students either fled the room, attempted to restrain the boy seeing the invisible demons, or simply watched in stunned disbelief. The campus reverend tried to talk Hades down, others attempted to ease the tension with jokes and Harry Potter references, and eventually things turned into a mass exodus as things just got too weird.
Eventually, the paramedics arrived and, though this could not be confirmed, likely treated the boy who had taken the mushrooms and transported him to the clinic for recovery. The remarkable thing was that only one student seemed physically affected by the mushrooms, as opposed to more of them. In a class that large, there really should have been more than just one, shouldn’t there have?
Reactions to the class were definitely mixed as students processed what had just transpired. This clearly wasn’t the first bizarre moment in one of Professor Hades’s classes. Apparently the man has a reputation for theatrical and somewhat questionable teaching methods. Several students raised questions about the safety and professionalism on campus, boundaries when it came to practical lessons, and whether this crossed into dangerous territory or not. One student commented that the class was a “brazenly sexualized take on ancient Greek creation mythology, laced with illegal substance abuse and raging psychosis. Was fun.“
Whether you took part in the mushrooms yesterday or actually learned something about Gaius and Uranus between all the sexual tension, danger, and dad jokes, Professor Hades’ class will definitely not be one that students forget anytime soon…
The Editor Writes: Typical CU Hiring practices.
