If a student falls and no one is there to hear him, does he make a noise?

Last night while I was standing in the hallway in Reade eating my sandwich (we aren't allowed to eat in the lab) I saw my professor Ms. Hoskins (a Medieval German scholar working on her Ph.D.). We started talking about the two day midterm that I had just taken. The first day was "short" answers and the second an essay. Thankfully she gave us a list of names to chose from (choose one of the following) to write our short answers on. One of the names that we could write about was King Henry VIII of England. Bingo! I'm currently taking History of England with Dr. Winquist and had written a 10 page essay on Henry VII, Henry's father. I knew quite a bit about Henry VIII and why he was important to the development to the church.

Remember? He wanted to divorce his first wife (his brother Arthur's wife before he died) because she wasn't producing male children (A huge issue for the Tudor family was to ensure their continuation as rulers of England. That's why it was important for Henry VII to set up his son Arthur w/ a good alliances a.k.a. Spain). So, Henry VIII sent his faithful servant Cardinal Wolsey to convince the Pope to annul the marriage. To make a long story short, the Pope couldn't because Henry's wife was Charles V's aunt. Right before this incident Charles had actually sacked Rome and had the Pope in his palm. The Pope couldn't do anything and was in a hard position. He didn't want to make Charles mad (he was the Holy Roman Emperor!) but at the same time he didn't want to disappoint Henry VIII who had a terrible temper. Well, the Pope chose Charles over Henry and lost all of England (Henry became the head of the Church of England just so that he could divorce his brother's wife).

So, on the short answer on Henry VIII I had actually written that Henry was married to Queen Isabella. Isabella is a good Spanish name no? Well, it turns out that Isabella was actually Charle's grandmother, NOT his aunt. His aunt's name was Catherine (Isabella's daughter). So, I had majorly goofed on the name. My answer still proved that I know a lot on Henry and his importance. At most my goof might cause someone to chuckle, BUT IT WAS STILL WRONG. I expressed my humorous grief to Ms. Hoskins, who thought the mix up was pretty funny to.

The subject of conversation then switched over to the essay topic that I had written on. I chose the essay that dealt with the spread of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland. I had been curious about that topic beforehand and had done some minor research about it. The text-book that we are reading really didn't offer an exact answer, but I was able to extract enough to give a reasonable answer. Because I hadn't found a concrete answer in the book, I preceded to ask Ms. Hoskins what she thought on the matter. She was willing to talk about it, especially when I shared with her that I had actually gone back to the text-book to find the answer. I think I covered most of it, except that I had completely missed that Luther had used nationalism to stir people up. Oh well....

Today in class, Ms. Hoskins brought our blue books with her and handed them back, giving us 15 minutes to change answers if we wanted to. AHA! I quickly fixed Henry's problem in the short answer and added a bit on nationalism to my Reformation essay. She told us that we shouldn't only study history for the test but out of love of the subject. If we really loved what we were studying, we would have gone to the books after the test to see how we had done. A good lesson, and I'm sure some of my classmates are hitting themselves on the head for not checking their answers. :)

The End.