This 'Beatles PhD' schooled kids who believed John, Paul, George, and Ringo were from Florida
"I have a bit of an obsessive streak to my personality, and the Beatles are a band that rewards obsessive listening. There are all sorts of little nuggets buried that you didn't hear the first 99 times, but the 100th time, you hear them. By the time I was in college, I was a full-on Beatles completist. I had given myself, like, a Beatles PhD. After college, I applied to teach at Saint Gregory the Great at Ashland and Bryn Mawr in Andersonville. It was basically a charter high school within the archdiocese, and the administration was so incompetent. They had just fired all the teachers and left only one nun, Sister Mary. The yearbook that year had all these bitter messages: "After working here for 25 years and being told I'm no longer capable of using technology . . . "
"Sister Mary was behind the front desk when I handed her my resumé, and she put it on top of the pile because she liked me for some reason, so that's how I got hired. Three weeks before the school year started, we're sitting in this office, me and Sister Mary and two other new teachers, and it was like, "Who's gonna teach American history? How about journalism?" I said, "Well, if you need a Beatles class, I'm your man." She says, "Will you have time to prepare it?" I said, "Sister Mary, I've been preparing for this class my entire life." I taught it every year until the school closed three years later.
By: John Sturdy
Source: Chicago Reader
