This reminded me of the only Summer School class I had there. I lived alone in the attic of an ancient slate-shingled house on the lake, and swam to class every morning. The Memorial Union had lockers back then, so I kept clothes and a towel there.
(I’m afraid this is off-subject; the teacher wasn’t offbeat at all… but years later, I’d often take my students and fellow teachers to that terrace for pitchers and brats. Omigod, maybe I’m the offbeat teacher!)
This happened to me in Freshman English! Well, not the Mountain Men, but we were assigned to write a paper on the language specific to a group. I chose the language of movie gangsters, because I watched a ton of those old Warner Brothers gangster movies (this was before the Godfather movies and others of that ilk came out – I’m an old). There was no grade on my paper, and she asked me to see her after class. The penny did not drop. She asked me questions about the content of my paper, and I happily babbled on about certain bits I didn’t have room for in my paper. I think she believed me. It wasn’t until I left her office that I realized she’d thought I plagiarized it.
Damn. I’d never plagiarize. I’d rather turn in a crappy paper than do that. I had a kinda reverse situation later in an upper division class. I was not inspired by any of the topics set for our two assigned papers and did a slightly better than mediocre job on them. In the in-class final, I had a topic that really got me going (compare/contranst Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Nabokov’s Ada). That pulled my mediocre C’s up to a high B.
I’m not sure if this man was “offbeat” or not, but he seemed that way to me. He was an attorney, took a few cases every year to keep his hand in and whatnot. If I remember correctly, always pro bono. He taught “Personal Law” and coached girls volleyball when I was in high school in the 80s Always, without fail, wore a bow tie. That was probably the most immediately off beat thing about him. He said being an attorney was a backup plan if teaching didn’t work out