MANDATORY HISTORIOGRAPHY CREDIT FOR SENIORS NEEDING TO MEET DISTRIBUTION REQUIREMENTS
Act 2
"Britta," said Pierce, clapping her on the back as they followed Jeff into the classroom. Troy, Abed, Annie, and Shirley were already seated, "How long has it been?"
"Like a day and a half," Britta said as she took the seat on the end next to Troy.
"Oh, I remember sitting in classrooms like this with you guys," Pierce said wistfully as he took the rearmost seat in the room, behind Abed. "Like it was just yesterday."
"Instead of six days ago?" Jeff had slid into a seat between Shirley and Annie. He grinned at Annie as she shushed him.
"Is everybody here? Jeffrey? Yes?" The dean appeared, suddenly, in the doorway. "Hello putative rising seniors," he began with a wave.
The class managed a 'hello' back, in ragged unison.
"Welcome to 'Mandatory Historiography Credit for Seniors Needing to Meet Distribution Requirements,' or as I like to call it, Man-Hist-Cred for, uh… Sennedmet Dist-Req." He started to write that on the chalkboard in the front of the room, and got as far as Cred before giving up. "I'm sure you've noticed that the course syllabus and instructor are both listed as TBD in the catalog. And probably you're thinking that I'm here to shed some light on this mysterious… Man-hiss-cred." He gestured towards the letters he'd scrawled behind him.
"Or maybe you're wondering why instead of something fun like a sexy bee or sexy Indian chief or sexy mustard or frog, I'm in administrator drag like this?" The dean indicated his corduroy jacket and tie. "Well, I can answer both concerns with the same answer: a compulsory anti-shilly-shallying initiative led by one of our school board's newest members! Pierce?"
"Thank you, dean," Pierce said, rising to his feet. "Ladies, gentlemen, Vicky." He scowled at Vicky, who scowled right back. "As you all know, I'm Pierce Hawthorne, leader of the so-called Greendale Seven. We saved the school when it was overrun by feral children, this past spring? You remember."
There was a murmur in the crowd. Almost all of the students in 'Mandatory Historiography Credit for Seniors Needing to Meet Distribution Requirements' had shared classes with the study group over the last four years.
"As a direct result of that series of unfortunate events, I was asked to spearhead an initiative… one of many policy initiatives I've spearheaded over my illustrious career… you know, I approved the funding for the Hawthorne Paper Products research team that developed an artificial lime scent safe for use on wipes for babies of all races? Not just white and black, all the miscellaneous ones, too. So I know a thing or two about inclusion and the importance of diversity and other PC buzzwords."
"Where is he going with this?" Annie whispered to Jeff. Jeff shook his head, unsure.
"And I also know, thanks to experiences with several other formulations of artificial lime scent, a series of class-action lawsuits, and binding nondisclosure agreements…" Pierce paused, apparently for dramatic effect. "I also know the importance of sweeping potentially damaging information under the rug. There's a sign-in sheet… has everyone signed it? Where is it?"
The sign-in sheet, the top sheet of several on a clipboard, was at that moment being passed to Abed.
"Okay, once everyone has signed that, I'll continue. In the meantime, uh, dean, why don't you explain to the class that there is no 'Mandatory Historiography Credit for Seniors Needing to Meet Distribution Requirements' and we made it up?"
There was a chorus of what?s and I don't understands and let's riots from the crowd. The dean, who had sat back down at the front of the class during Pierce's speech, rose again to his feet. "Calm down, calm down, everybody, it's all right," he told them. "Pierce is right. Man Hiss was our invention to get everyone who intends to graduate at the end of the year together, for this series of dramatic announcements. Why?" he asked, repeating the questions students in the front were already peppering him with. "Because no one reads my emails, that's why! No matter how many exclamation marks I use!"
"But I checked the student handbook," muttered Annie. "There is a mandatory historiography requirement, and there aren't any other historiography classes besides this one."
Shirley, next to her, nodded in agreement. "I don't have time for this damn foolishness!"
"I know, I know," the dean said, trying again to quiet the crowd. "No one has time for my damn foolishness. And besides if you were all in one class it'd be too big and it'd violate the fire codes. Technically we're in violation right now, but I won't tell if you don't." The dean made a pooh-poohing gesture. "Anyway there will be two sections of Historiography offered. I have the schedules right here. The A section," he held up a sheet on a clipboard in his right hand, "meets for one hour, Monday through Friday, at six in the morning, and the B section," here he flipped to the second page on the clipboard, "meets Thursdays in the afternoon lab slot, from one thirty to three. I have here two more sign-up sheets, I'm going to pass these around. We can't have more than twenty-five students in each section, so, when one fills up, it fills up."
"Speaking of sheets, has everyone signed in yet? Yes? Yes!" Pierce scooped up the sign-in sheet from Britta, the last to sign in. "I'll be right back."
"And apparently Pierce will be right back," said the dean, as Pierce ducked out the back door of the classroom. "So that's fun."
The dean handed the sheets to someone in the front row, and the crowd of students surged forward. Everyone wanted to sign up for the class that didn't meet at six in the morning.
Stuck in the back of the class, the study group tried to push through the crowd, but couldn't reach the front.
"I don't believe this," said Troy. "We're being punished for sitting in the cool section!"
"But isn't sitting in the cool section its own reward?" offered Abed.
"That may be true," conceded Troy. "I would have to think about it, and I have a better idea!" He leaped up onto the table in front of his seat, and hopped forward to the table in the next row, and on until he stood head and shoulders about the rest of the class, in the midst of the crowd busily signing up for the weekly afternoon section. "Yoink!" he cried, snatching the clipboard out of Leonard's hands.
"Hey!"
"Shut up Leonard," Troy said over his shoulder as he hopped back on the table-tops to the rest of the study group. "You're old and bald and don't have any friends!"
"There's no need to be hateful," Leonard said quietly.
Troy reached the study group only moments ahead of the crowd of their fellow-seniors. He tossed the clipboard down into their midst, as everyone circled. With admirable teamwork, Jeff, Britta, Shirley, and Abed formed a human shield around Annie, who held the clipboard and a pen.
"Hurry up and write our names!" Britta said with a groan. "Someone's elbow is digging into my back!"
Annie flipped back and forth between the two sections' pages. "You guys, there's a problem. There are only two slots left in the afternoon section." She started writing their names in the morning section, beginning with her own. Unsurprisingly it still had plenty of slots open.
"It's not a problem," said Jeff. He snatched the clipboard away from her.
"Hey!"
Jeff scanned the afternoon section roster, and crossed out four names of people he didn't like. "Now there's six." He scribbled his name in one of the remaining blanks, and Annie's below it. He'd started on Abed's, in the margin with an arrow pointing to one of the crossed-out names, when Annie snatched the clipboard back from him.
"Jeff! You can't do that!" Scowling, she crossed out her own name on the afternoon section's sheet.
"What are you doing?" Jeff shrieked as Annie added his name to the morning section's sheet. He pulled it away from her and started crossing out and writing names, she took it back and did the same, and so on.
The clipboard passed back and forth between them several more times before Vicky finally broke through, between Britta and Shirley. She grabbed the clipboard and threw it, overhand, across the room where another student caught it. "Not everything is all about you!" Vicky snapped at the group before dashing off in the direction she'd thrown the clipboard.
"You know that's not true!" Jeff called out to her.
"Where did we end up?" Shirley asked Jeff and Annie. The pair exchanged nervous glances.
"I'm not sure," Annie said.
"I can't believe you wrote my name in the morning section," Jeff told her.
"You crossed it out!"
"And you crossed out your name in the afternoon section!" he retorted.
"Jeff, we wouldn't all fit in the afternoon section."
"That's okay! They don't all have to take the same section as us. They could have taken the morning section, and we'd find some blow-off elective to take with them."
"Listen to yourself," Annie said coldly, her arms folded. "What 'us' are you even talking about?"
Before Jeff answered he heard the dean calling, once again, for order from the front of the classroom. "I don't know why I always do it like this. Somebody always gets trampled, you'd think we'd learn. Oh, well. Would somebody help Kyle to the health center? Thanks, great…"
The class gradually took their seats again as the dean leafed through the two section sheets. "My, you people really made a mess of things, didn't you? Hard to believe you're all only a few credits short of bachelor's degrees. I'm going to read off these rosters, just to make sure we have the right head count. Starting with the afternoon section, I see Annie Kim, Frederick Lindstrom…"
It turned out that, at the point Vicky snatched away the rosters, Jeff and Annie had managed to split the six of them fifty-fifty between the two sections. Jeff, Abed, and Britta were in the afternoon section, while Annie, Shirley, and Troy were in the morning section.
"See what you did?" Jeff and Annie demanded of one another.
"Oh, you spoke in unison! I love when people do that," said Troy.
"I don't see why you're upset," Annie snapped at Jeff, ignoring Troy.
"Calm down, both of you, please," suggested Shirley in her best Mom voice.
"Because now we're in different sections, which was totally preventable!" Jeff retorted, ignoring Shirley.
"Apparently who's in the afternoon section doesn't matter so long as it's you. And the rest of us can just find some blow-off elective to take with you."
Jeff smacked his forehead and ran his hand back through his hair. "Maybe? I have a really tight schedule this semester and next, to graduate on time. I wanted to take some more classes over the summer, but when we had to retake Biology…"
"So that was just an idle promise? Augh!" Annie spun away from him, her hair flaring out, and stomped out of the classroom.
"Annie!" Jeff called, chasing after her.
Britta, Shirley, and Troy all shook their heads and sighed. Abed sighed, too, a moment later.
"Those two are so exhausting," Shirley said.
"Tell me about it," agreed Britta.
"Yeah, so exhausting," agreed Abed. "Who are we talking about? Are we talking about Jeff and Annie, or Neil and Vicky, or Pierce and the dean, or Ross and Rachel on Friends, or…?"
"Why would we be talking about Friends?" asked Shirley. "Bunch of skinny white people who sit around drinking coffee all day."
"I don't know!" cried Abed. "You all three made the same face a minute ago." He pointed at them accusingly. "Don't deny it. When you all make the same face like that, it means there's been some kind of cue I missed."
"I don't see why the afternoon class is such a prize, anyway," said Troy. "It's at the same time as my Advanced Seminars on Truth, Beauty and Freon class in the AC Repair Annex."
"You're taking a class called Advanced Seminars on Truth, Beauty and Freon?" asked Shirley.
"Actually I'm teaching it." Troy smiled bashfully. "On account of I'm, you know, their messiah."
"Ooh!" Britta snapped her fingers. "That's it! You get the AC Repair guys to get you all into the afternoon section with us! They can do that, I bet."
"What? No, I'm not going to ask them to do that. I'm teaching a class then."
"You can teach it any time, though."
"No, I can't, dummy," Troy replied. "It's the only block of time in the week that the hot tub isn't booked."
"There's a hot tub?" Britta looked incredulous.
"Who said hot tub?" Troy said quickly. "Nobody said there's a secret jacuzzi and sauna in the AC Repair Annex."
"C'mon," she whined. "Do you really want to get up at, like, five for a six AM class?"
"I get up at five every morning," said Troy.
"No. Really?" asked Britta.
"He does," Abed said, nodding. "And he's really cheerful, too. It's kind of disgusting. No offense," he added to Troy.
"None taken, buddy." Troy and Abed did their special handshake. "You could switch to the morning section," he said to Britta.
She laughed. "Yeah, I could… oh, you're serious. I'm not doing that."
Before Troy could respond, the dean called again for order. "I want to turn things over to your new Historiography professor. Wait, where's Jeffrey? We can't start without… ah." The dean nodded as Jeff slunk back into the classroom through the rear doors, stonefaced and without Annie.
"Well, without further ado, let me introduuuooouuu…" The dean began to mime a drumroll, and held the diphthong until a few students at the front of the room gamely beat their tabletops. "…Duce Doctor Winston Armitage, formerly of Yale!" The dean applauded furiously, and the class joined in. "Winston?" the dean called towards the open front door of the classroom.
"Doctor Armitage." The professor who sauntered into the classroom from the hall was the tweediest man any of them had ever seen. His corduroy jacket and tie appeared to have been the model for the dean's own outfit, and his profile wouldn't have looked out of place on the obverse of a coin. "Hello, students. I'm not certain I understand the pedagogical reasoning behind these theatrics, but I assure you there will be none in the actual course."
He glared at the dean.
"The syllabus is being passed around," Dr. Armitage continued. He gestured towards the dean, who had a stack of thick stapled packets. "Now, as it indicates, this is a writing-intensive course. Over the twelve weeks of class, you will be expected to write six papers. Nothing fancy there, just six to eight pages on one of the approved topics. Every day in class there will be a quiz over the previous lecture's material. The mid-term will be an in-room open-book exam, and for the final you will write an annotated bibliography. I ask students every year at the end of class what one piece of advice they'd give their younger selves who were just beginning, and the number one response each time is to start working on the bibliography immediately, because if you put it off until the last two weeks of classes you'll never finish in time. Now the breakdown of points is twenty percent quizzes, twenty-five percent… yes?"
"The, uh, there's, uh, not enough… syllabuses," said Garrett, who'd had his hand raised.
"There aren't enough syllabi?" repeated Dr. Armitage. "Hm. Are people only taking one each? There should be twenty-five, one for each person in the section."
"Both sections are here, Winston," the dean interjected.
"Both…?" Dr. Armitage shook his head. He counted students, shaking his head in annoyed disgust. "I'm only teaching one section. We agreed to this, Craig." He turned to the dean. "One section, no more than twenty-five students, and you stop catfishing my sister."
"Well, okay, I mean, firstly, what is catfishing, anyway?" The dean threw up his hands as Dr. Armitage kept scowling. "Right, yes. I have someone else teaching the other section. You're completely independent of each other."
As Armitage and the dean continued to argue, Jeff turned to the group. "Is everyone else hearing this?"
"Absolutely," said Abed. "It's a classic devil-you-know scenario. On the one hand, staying in Armitage's class will mean insane amounts of work and possibly failing. On the other, the other class meets in the middle of the night —"
"It's not the middle of the night, the middle of the night is 3:07 AM exactly," interrupted Troy. "You know that, measuring it was your idea."
Abed nodded, accepting the correction. "The other class meets very early and is made up, at this point, mostly of people whose names Jeff crossed out from the first section. So do we stay in Armitage's class —"
"Troy and I aren't in Armitage's class," Shirley pointed out.
"Or do we plunge into the unknown?" Abed pointed at each group member in turn. "Unknown? Unknown? Unknown?"
"Obviously we switch to the morning section," Jeff said wearily. "There's only eight people in it now, so that won't be a problem."
"You're only saying that because it's what Annie wants," Britta snapped. "I move we disregard Jeff's opinion entirely."
"I'm not just saying that for Annie's sake!" Jeff protested.
"You always do whatever she says." Britta turned to Abed, Troy, and Shirley for support.
"She's right, you do," said Shirley.
"You complain and refuse to do it, and then you do it," agreed Abed.
Troy nodded. "It was cute at first but it's played out now."
Jeff slapped the table in front of him in a call for order. "Listen, I'm not going to write papers for some freak of nature who actually wants to grade a hundred and fifty eight-page papers, three hundred quizzes, twenty-five exams, and twenty-five annotated bibliographies. I don't know what an annotated bibliography is, and I don't care to learn. I… don't… care… to learn," he repeated, emphasizing each word in turn. "Who's with me?"
"I'm in," Britta said immediately. "I don't want to learn, either."
Abed nodded.
"Well, again, Troy and I are already in the morning section," Shirley said. "So we only need to stay where we are, and your little drama doesn't affect us."
"Great," Jeff said. He rapped the table for emphasis. "So we're agreed."
"Jeff comes around and Annie gets exactly what she wants," said Britta. "There's a shocker."
"I… no. I'm not going to engage." Jeff closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
"What if all the other students in the afternoon section decide they don't want to write three hundred papers either, though?" Britta asked no on in particular.
"I don't think that'll be a problem," Troy said, blanching slightly. "Look who Pierce just brought in." He pointed to the front of the room, where Pierce had led in the instructor for the morning section.
"Buenos dias, children!"
