Sources have confirmed that a student in Mr. Guevara’s 4th-hour Honors English class made an insightful, thought-provoking comment during a Socratic Seminar Wednesday.  This comment reportedly left his fellow classmates shocked and in utter disbelief.

The student, who sources have identified as Carl Marks, reportedly sat silently for the first half hour of the Seminar until another student asked a pointless, uninspired question about what a character in their book was thinking at a particular time.  After listening to one student respond with a nonsensical comparison to some book she read years ago, Marks raised his hand and spoke thoughtfully about human nature and how people respond to trauma.  The room then went silent for several minutes, with even the teacher stunned that a student had spoken using less than five cliches.

“Everyone knows that the point of a Socratic Seminar is to get a good grade,” said Fred Angles, one of Marks’s classmates.  “You don’t get a good grade by bringing up good ideas.  The way you get a good grade is by speaking exactly the right number of times in a variety of different categories,” such as “personal experiences” and “referencing another text.”  “It doesn’t matter if you speak in all cliches – you’ll still get a great grade.  Everyone knows this.  So when Carl said something profound and original, we were all stunned.”

After realizing how much Marks’s comment had added to the discussion, other students reportedly considered doing the same thing.  “Then we realized that Carl had gotten a score of 85% on the Seminar, because he only spoke twice and both of his comments fell under the ‘new perspectives’ category,” said Angles.  “That made us all remember that the point of Socratic Seminars isn’t to have an intellectual discussion – it’s to repeat cliches in a variety of ways in order to get a good grade.”