As a music education major, the vast majority of my classes were with the students in my year and major—which happened to be a group of nine girls. We were all close friends and roommates, and spent basically every minute of those four years together. Over the course of those years, our professors became like family. We were frequently scheming to catch them by surprise or to just be silly with them. Once during a senior-level choral conducting class, our entire class hid around the choir room from Dr. Ron Blackley, who was running a few minutes behind for our class. Once or twice, we showed up on the front porch of Dr. Marla Butke’s house with sleeping bags, Finding Neverland and Ben & Jerry’s for a surprise living room sleepover. One of the best—and most memorable—antics, though, was our constant effort to get Dr. Don Sloan off track during his music theory lessons.
Dr. Sloan is an incredibly intelligent individual—he was well known among students and faculty for his short run on Jeopardy!—and has seemingly endless knowledge about a wide range of topics. If our class was running behind on our assignments, or simply just feeling overwhelmed with life, we’d start asking him questions to get him off topic and keep him off topic—pushing our big assignments out if we could. Because he’s such a caring man, he’d do his best to answer us, but because he’s good at his job, he eventually put a stop to it and said, “Listen, I want to be here for all of you and answer your questions, but we’re never going to get through the curriculum if we keep this up. Tell you what: let’s have dinner in convo once a month, and you can ask me anything you want, for as long as you want.” And so, the “Dinner Digressions” were born. Monthly, we’d dine together and dive deep into a wealth of topics. To this day—more than a decade since we’ve graduated—we all still get together pretty regularly with Dr. Sloan and the other faculty when they’re around.
