Lincoln Hall Project
Jason Peterson (BS ’11, English), tells his father, Doug Peterson (BS ’77, journalism), about smoke bombs, damming up the Boneyard, dynamite scares, and other details about one of his more memorable classes at U of I.
Doug: We’ll I’d like to hear about your memorable teachers. I know you’ve had some pretty memorable ones, particularly the guy who liked to blow things up. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Jason: Yeah. I took one class—NPRE 101, which stands for Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiation Engineering—basically because it covered two credits in one. It sounded kind of daunting, the title of the class, but regardless of that really what made the class awesome was my professor David Ruzic who is pretty much the most fun, as far as excitement, professor I’ve ever seen or heard of. The way he came in the first day of class, he stood outside of the room, so we were like, “Where’s the professor?” We were kind of confused. Then, one of the TAs steps up and said, “Now presenting your professor, David Ruzic!” And a smoke bomb was thrown down. I guess he had the door cracked open, threw a smoke bomb through the crack of the door, threw the door open, and came in through the smoke bomb out of the smoke. That was his entrance, first of all, to the class alone. On the first day he promised to blow at least one thing up every class.
On an average class we had a lot of excitement period. But we did a lot of fun things as well. He taught a class in the Boneyard Creek. He put boots on and got a whiteboard and put it in the creek and taught us about how to make a dam and the different things about calculating sort of the speed of the water and how much power you can get by actually showing us by damming up the Boneyard Creek and teaching on a whiteboard inside the creek.
He had a prank—sometimes he liked to just prank us and have some fun. It was pretty funny. He brought in a fake stick of dynamite and said, “Alright, now we’re going to move on to explosives. I want to teach you a little bit about explosives. But of course I’m gonna give you guys a demonstration fist so you guys can get a look at it.” He said, “I’m gonna light this stick of dynamite. Don’t worry I’ve done this before; I’m just gonna throw it outside the window and just watch the explosion. It’s amazing what it actually looks like.” So he had it all built up, and he lights this fake stick of dynamite and then…and there was even an older woman in the class. I’m not sure if she was taking the class or if she was auditing it, but she made sort of a motherly comment. She was like, “You better be careful with that.” She totally believed it was real. I felt pretty confident it was fake, but not everyone did. And then what he did was he intentionally misthrew it so it bounced off the window and back into the room. And just started shaking and going, “Oh! No! No!” and sprinted out of the room, kind of scaring everyone into thinking the dynamite was going to blow up in the room. Some people were scared, but you could tell some people knew it was gonna be a fake. Either way I thought it was a pretty funny attempt at a prank anyway. It was pretty creative. It was things like that that kept the class interesting and kept us focused and wanting to be in the classroom, because we had to deal with some fairly heavy material. So I think it worked pretty well.
(Length: 2:47)