Wednesday, September 13, 2017

If you were a superhero, what power would you have?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

If you were a superhero, what power would you have?

Listed from usual to much less usual, students replied:

  • invisibility
  • flying
  • run fast / super speed
  • teleportation / being in multiple places at once
  • shapeshifting
  • time travel / ability to stop time / napping, but while I nap, time stops
  • slowing time
  • existing forever / immortality
  • I would just be Aquaman
  • superior intellect
  • honestly this might be awful but reading minds
  • rearrange atoms - make whatever I want
  • greening the world
  • produce infinite pasta

I appreciated the computer science-themed answers, too:

  • brute-force algorithms in constant time
  • moving nondeterministically
  • solving P vs. NP


The "Wait, does that mean... ?" prize for most thought-invoking superpower goes to "breaking the fourth wall". A Most Meta Medal goes to the superpower, "make one more person a superhero."

But my favorite was the keep-your-dreams-manageable student whose superpower would simply be "to not be lactose intolerant."


This post's theme word is acnestis, "the part of the body where one cannot reach to scratch." (Etymology: from From Greek aknestis (spine), from Ancient Greek knestis (spine, cheese-grater).) My superpower would be the ability to eliminate my acnestis and satisfy an itch by scratching anywhere!

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