The unluckiest lucky people
I’ve used this one in classes of college students, and actually it was part of my first cross-institutional pilot. People, I give you… Lucky Anna!
Throw up the following image on screen.
And then set the scene. This is shared with you by friend. The caption reads:
“Anna Mae Dickinson is quite possibly the luckiest woman ever. She survived the sinking of both the Titanic and Lusitania, the Hindenburg explosion, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and, when she was 97, the destruction of her apartment during the 9/11 terror attack.”
At this point I usually make my corny joke that this seems to me to be a very broad definition of “luck”. It’s corny, but honestly a lot of teaching is being corny.
Slight tangent about teaching here. There’s a story about the musical artist named Beck. As I remember it, he gave some early concerts when he moved to danceable music. And he wanted people to dance. But everyone was just standing there. And one day he realized the problem was him. You see, he was trying to be the coolest person in the room, which is what you’re taught a rock and roller should be. But when you’re the coolest person in the room, nobody has permission to be uncool, and if that’s table stakes then certainly no one is going to dance.
So one night (and I’m elaborating a bit here, I heard this story a decade and a half ago) he does The Robot. Crowd goes wild. He does other dorky dances. And then, amazingly, the crowd starts dancing. Really dancing. He’s broken the coolness spell.
Anyway, when I read that, it changed my own teaching. I suddenly realized I was trying to be the coolest kid in the room. That’s death. So now I tell my dad jokes. Make fun of how out of touch I am. Sometimes look a bit confused. It’s revolutionary.
People don’t get this about a misinfo curriculum — wait a second they say, you’re using a Britney Spears death hoax example? Shouldn’t you use Billie Eilish? First of all, trust me, students know who Britney Spears is. Secondly, you can introduce any old prompt by joking about how old you are. I have a prompt that I’ll share later this month that has old 2005 era cell phones supposedly popping corn with their 2g signal. You know what I love about it? I get to intro it with hey, does anybody know what this bricky-looking device is? while they all roll their eyes like, of course we know, we’re not idiots. You can talk a bit about how cool you thought you were with your three pound T-Mobile Sidekick. Now you’re doing the classroom version of The Robot, and it’s ten times better than trying to come up with the hippest reference, trust me.
OK, back to Anna, our unluckiest lucky person. Now the thing the students might want to do is decide if this is plausible — do the dates add up, etc. You all know my feelings on this. I mean, what would it mean if they did? Subtract the sinking of the Titanic (1911) from the 9/11 attack and yeah, it’s possible. But why did you just waste your time there, when this positive result proves nothing?
The math here — it’s manipulation. It’s literally a trap. The person sharing this has given you the numbers and dared you to do the subtraction. And once you’ve done it, you’re one step closer to believing it.
Don’t be a dupe. Start with the core of this, and look up Anna Mae Dickinson.
This source Irish Central pops to the top. Further down the page is Snopes, and if the students haven’t used Snopes yet, this is a good chance to introduce them. But let’s check out Irish Central.
Scanning the page we find… it actually links to Snopes. So to Snopes we go.
The Snopes page tells the story — this fictional personal was featured in an obviously satirical article mocking people who said it was too soon in 2006 to make a film about the World Trade Center attack. In the article Anna gets asked about a film about 9/11 and she thinks really, even the the Titanic is too fresh a memory — the fact they made a 1990s movie out of a 1911 tragedy was beyond the pale:
This time, Anna Mae answers loud and clear, with no need for assistance from her nurse: “Too soon,” she cries. “Too soon. The wounds are all still too fresh. They had no right to make that disgusting movie about our poor ship when some of us were still alive to feel the pain.” And then she commences to sob like an eight-year-old girl.
[…]
So if New Yorkers think they’re exquisitely sensitive, maybe they should take a minute to think about the titanic example set by Anna Mae. For many of the 9/11 survivors, it will be a long, hard, distracting road to the age of 102, and the truth is, too many of them aren’t dwelling nearly enough in the past to make their grief last so long and so monotholically.
In a very common pattern this gets separated from the satirical context and passed on.
That’s about it, but I’ll say one other thing about the prompt — the picture is another clue, if you want to talk that route into it, but I’ll let you chart that path on your own. Right-click and go from there.