College student forgets to fix a placeholder name in essay, but luckily the professor acknowledged her creativity
A freshman student at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, learned the hard way to always proofread her assignments, including the headers, before submitting her final work when she realized that an essay she wrote contained an embarrassing placeholder name instead of the professor’s name.
Zoey Oxley, a studio art major, couldn’t recall her new professor’s last name, so instead of spending time looking it up, she got started on her project. However, when she handed in her first assignment to the teacher through her university’s turnitin.com portal, which is a plagiarism detection website, she realized her faux pas — she had never replaced the nickname with his real name.
The assignment she turned in for her Viewing Performance class, which was meant to be addressed to her teacher, first-year MFA playwriting student John Hendel, was, in fact, addressed to “Professor whats his nuts.”
Unfortunately, Oxley was not able to resubmit the paper.
A series of unfortunate events: pic.twitter.com/xSnT0JTYPV
— zo !!! (@Zoeyoxley) September 20, 2018
“I had just submitted it and closed my laptop when I realized what I had done, and I immediately started to freak out. I had never been so embarrassed in my life,” Oxley told Yahoo Lifestyle.
She quickly sent Hendel an email with an apology. “I could not remember your last name, so I filled it with something completely unprofessional,” she wrote. “It was my intention to change the name before submission, but it completely slipped my mind.”
Oxley told Yahoo Lifestyle, “It wasn’t the best way to start the class.”
Luckily, Hendel writes comedies, often absurd comedies, and he was able to see the humor behind the name. “Initially I assumed they meant they had simply misspelled my name or something, but then I saw what they were actually referring to,” the esteemed Professor Whats His Nuts told Yahoo. “I absolutely saw the creativity. I’m familiar with ‘what’s his name’ and ‘what’s his face,’ but ‘what’s his nuts’ was new to me.”
A student emailed me, profusely apologizing for getting my name wrong at the top of their paper, and I was like, “Thanks, whatever, nbd.” Then I got to their paper and saw their instructor was “Professor whats his nuts”
— John Hendel (@Hendyhendel) September 19, 2018
Hendel and Oxley’s next class will be on Thursday. “I’m so nervous because I know it’s going to get brought up,” Oxley said. “…But [I’m] also looking forward to laughing about it with Professor Hendel.”
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