2020 Wylde Woolley Award Winner
Ethan Ashbrook
Ben Leff writes:
I would like to nominate Ethan Ashbrook for a "lifetime achievement" award of sorts. recognizing Ethan for all the bizarre, inspired, clever, sometimes mystifying things he has done. The thing you have to understand about Ethan is that he is weird, Gloriously weird. Despite being a school for "smart kids," Uni has a lot of students that typically try to adhere to the behavioral norms of "cool teenager" in the way they carry themselves: their fashion, their speech style, their musical taste. Not Ethan. To give you a taste:
- His email signature is "Ethan A. An cellopofusciouhipoppokunurious kind of guy."
- He turned in an essay for me in Morse code (though if I scrolled down, he also included the essay in plain English).
- He spends free time in an abandoned classroom with his intellectual buddies, doing stuff like drawing Winnie the Pooh memes by hand on the whiteboard.
- Those same buddies all collectively dressed up as the cast of the Magic School Bus for Halloween, and Ethan was Ms. Frizzle.
- He wears a shirt that reads "John Cage 4'33""
- As Executive secretary of Student Council, he sends out minutes that begin with amusing (and occasionally slightly subversive) memes satirizing student life at Uni.
- About half of the frequent comments he made in my history classes were smart-aleck jokes. And most of those jokes demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the subject we were studying. (Admittedly, sometimes he was just being a smart aleck)
- If I don't get to class at the beginning of the passing period, he will get onto the computer attached to the projector start playing some bizarre Eastern European techno song on YouTube.
- He goes down the hall playing random songs on his melodica; indeed, in our school talent show, he played the War of 1812 Overture on the melodica while one of his friends simulated the cannons by banging her shoes on the floor.
I like to think of Uni not just as school for "smart kids" or kills who are "good at school." but as a school for quirky, interesting, creative, intellectually curious kids. Ethan Ashbrook embodies this ideal. He strikes me as the kind of student that Wylde Q. Chicken himself would be quite happy to see at Uni in 2020.