Happy UN Day

An hour left of work and I have had an emotional roller coaster day.  Mostly shades of anger and disbelief at stupidity displayed.   There was a few nice wins so it balances out. 

 

So Model UN.  Our international studies class got invited my Junior year in college and we were assigned to represent Canada.  The conference was held in NYC at a cool old hotel and we were broken up into UN subcommittees and I ended up on the Nuclear technology group.   We had to make resolutions and follow all the UN procedure and I met students from all over the US and a bunch of international universities too.  The US was represented by a German school and a very short black guy from South Africa was the Honorable Representative from Sweden.  I think the organizers had a sense of humor.  The first day we sat in on a UN meeting and toured the facility and later in the day we met with the delegation from the country we were representing.   Canada was not exactly exciting but know a lot about Canadian economics and nuclear ideology has helped me out later in life.  It was an intense seminar, we all stayed up too late drafting resolutions and negotiating back and forth but it was very memorable.     I kept in touch with a few of the other kids for a while but not that long.

 

The more interesting side of the story was how much I absolutely hated the teacher in charge of this class.   She was very Afrocentric and for a class entitled American international affairs, she basically taught that the US was evil and did nothing but harm the rest of the world.  True or not, she did not even touch the fundamentals that we were supposed to be learning.  Her opinions were so liberal it hurt and she would not listen to any other opinion or even facts.   We were hostages twice a week....  She got it in her head that we should do this model UN and she actually harassed the administration to give us the money to do it.   The school paid for our fees, travel up there, hotel and we had to pay for food.  I drove up myself but apparently on the bus trip she slipped and fell and re-injured her hip.   By the time she got up to NYC she decided she had to go to the hospital.  At the hospital they decided she had a massive infection that had been there for a long time.   In the end, she never came back to school and died later that year.  The rest of the class was taught by my favorite teacher and he was amazed at what we had not been taught yet.   Ended quite well for me and very badly for her. 

 

So that is what UN day reminds me of;  a cool seminar, a bunch of smart people I met, and the demise of my least favorite teacher (yes, I even hated her more then Mrs Matulia)